


All the shit you left me

by Darke_Eco_Freak



Series: Everything we shared [2]
Category: Jak and Daxter
Genre: Companion Piece, M/M, Slow Burn, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 06:50:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 25,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4867217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darke_Eco_Freak/pseuds/Darke_Eco_Freak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Torn's a busy man, between managing the Underground movement and his own, personal affairs. So if things start turning up at the hideout, then that's not his problem. And if things start turning up more and more often, follow him between his change to a Commander of the guard and his efforts to save the planet? Well, he always manages to find his answers eventually, even if he's still a very busy man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A little red scarf

**Author's Note:**

> Meant to be read alongside All the shit I took. An introspective, world and character building attempt at in canon Jak/Torn.

It wasn't that Torn spent all this time in the Hideout, the hideout was just one of the few places he wouldn't be shot at on sight so he could usually be found there out of convenience and necessity. He'd quit the Guard, something only the dead and dying were allowed to do, he played a pivotal role in the success Underground movement so out of sight, out of mind was the best place for him. As a result, he usually acted as a maid/nurse for the movement, keeping supplies stocked and performing minor surgery when their real doctors were otherwise occupied. So it wasn't all that strange for him to find a dirty scarf snagged on a bed post.

The thing was streaked with muck and mud and what had to be blood though it had dried black and reeked of eco. The edges were ragged and the seams undone in places, there was even a jagged hole that looked far too messy for a knife but still too neat for a rip...and Torn  _knew_  this scarf, had seen it somewhere recently but couldn't remember exactly where.

He ended up stuffing it under a pillow, whoever'd left the thing would probably come back for it sometime soon and he didn't need to see it until then. But...days went by and no one touched the thing, no one even mentioned losing a scarf and he tried to forget about it. More time passed and still no one claimed the grimy bit of red and really it was just dirty, washing it shouldn't be hard and it was still pretty together.

A week after finding it, Torn pulled the scarf out of the drawer he'd been keeping it in and dumped it in with a load of bloodied cloth bandages. There was a laundromat that took in dirty clothes from the Underground free of charge and they usually got clothes back within the week, clean and ready to be used again. It was run by an older couple that had lost their Krimzon Guard son and daughter in the Dead Town raid and now most of the Guards left them alone out of respect and shame. The couple had joined the resistance nearly before their children were properly cremated, they'd seen Praxis for what he was and were hell bent on honouring their children's sacrifice.

Nell and Kern meant well, they really did, but they were getting older and it was just the two of them working the laudromat. They took in a lot of wash every day, from Guards to civvies, so it was normal to get a load back with a few things missing though Torn never mentioned it. He was just glad for their charity, not many people were willing to risk themselves for a movement they weren't even a real part of like Nell and Kern were.

He figured if the scarf came back from the wash then he might as well keep it, even if it was ready to fall apart there was still some use in it. Of course it came back, the hole fixed up with neat, tight stitches that Nell was known for and the seams repaired in long double back stitches that Kern excelled at. Torn'd meant to keep it in his drawer, to use it as an emergency bandage or something but somehow he found himself taking it out and running it through his fingers when shit started to overwhelm him, which was often.

The two rookies Errol had unknowingly sent his way came by eventually after finishing up whatever Krew had them doing, just as cocky, just as dirty and his temper got the better of him. The distress call had come in only two minutes ago and he'd meant to send in a proper team but if these two wanted to prove themselves then they might as well live up to those egos. So he sent them off to rescue Vin, all the while worrying the scarf and stealing glances at another red scarf.

The other one wrapped around the blond punk's neck and just as dirty as the one he found but the one in his hand couldn't be the kid's. For one thing the blond never mentioned it and for another, scarves were common among the Underground, a lot of members wore them so they could hide their faces. Oh but the kid hasn't been around for at least a week so it could be.

By the time Torn called out, the kid and his pet were already out the door and off to earn their keep. Torn never did remember to ask about the scarf between strategy planning and careful subterfuge though he somehow always kept it close at hand. At least this nervous habit wouldn't leave him shit faced in the gutter every other day.


	2. She's my past, will you be my future?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ashelin's out there, she hasn't checked in and she's out there, alone and possibly under attack and Torn can't do shit to help her. She's all he has left, the one person he can't give up.

The transmission had come in only seconds ago, the message scrambled from the poor signal outside of the security walls but it had been enough to put him on edge. Praxis was getting more and more desperate by the day; as the city's eco supplies started to run low and metal head scouts were sighted closer to the city so his end game was becoming more inventive. Never mind  ** _why_**  the city was running low on eco or  ** _how_  **the metal scouts had gotten this close without being shot down.

First he'd been hell bent on some kind of supersoldier, which had failed, so his next plan was even more destructive than the last; find Mar's tomb, find the precursor stone, crack it open, destroy the metals and possibly everything else. And since that seemed to be the best plan the maniac could come up with, he was working his guards overtime trying to find the damn tomb. People were being sent to all the remote places outside of the city that the metal heads had held for countless years. He'd even sent his own daughter out to the pumping station, the very same one that was overrun by the monsters Krew's muscle had gone to hunt as trophies.

"Fucking bastard," he hissed, glaring at the latest intel sent by his ' _contact in the guard_ ' and of course the asshole would expect a dick and a half for the tip off. Sometimes the deal he struck up with the Baron's new favourite was downright insane and helped no one but Erol but the man always managed to get them just enough prime information to make it worth it. Still didn't keep him from being a fucking bastard though, especially when he demanded a schedule of Underground attack dates for the next month, as if it was easy to coordinate a movement this large and this divided.

But Erol was the closest Torn had to an actual contact in the guard. Ashelin tried, of course she did, she'd become disillusioned with her father's regime years ago but that didn't mean she wasn't his daughter. Samos barely ever trusted information she sent their way, most often just outright refusing to hear it and making plans that completely went against whatever she'd said. It was just so much easier saying he had a source who couldn't be named and relying on the trust everyone had in him that they wouldn't sniff out his dirty little secret.

Now wasn't the time to bitch about that though, Ashelin's patrol hadn't checked in since they'd entered the pumping station. Five minutes radio silence could mean trouble, ten was definite a ambush, fifteen left you with a quarter of your original squad and twenty minutes was nothing less than death. Ashelin's last check in had been eight minutes ago. Erol would've gone himself,  _no he wouldn't have_ , but Praxis had him dealing with something else that was much more important and the KG couldn't spare anyone. At the moment, only Torn knew Ashelin was out there and the only one willing to help her was him.

Torn who could barely show his face in public without being spotted by some foot patrol and getting an instant red alert on his ass. Torn who couldn't send any of his people out to check on Ashelin because everybody in this damned city knew whose daughter she was and would probably take the chance to off her. Torn who wasn't even supposed to be in contact with Ashelin anymore because she was a liability, no matter how much they cared for each other. He had no options here unless he wanted to risk heading out himself and be captured the second he made it back into the city, if he even made it out in the first place.

"Fucker!" he growled, tugging hard at his hair and reaching for one of the many cigarettes Tess had taken to leaving around the hideout. He wasn't stupid, he knew it was her less than subtle way of trying to keep him off the alcohol, and somehow it was working. He stuck the thing in his mouth and searched his pockets for a lighter, the first hit of nicotine providing little to no relief. Praxis was coming down hard on Torn's people and while Erol might have them in his back pocket, he still didn't know where their HQ was and subsequently, where Torn was.

The arrogant prick had probably given him the intel in the hopes that Torn would go for Ashelin himself then Erol would be able to scoop him up easy. He'd be getting rid of a traitor and one of the Underground's most valuable members as well as please Praxis all in one fell swoop. While the foxy little shit might have some of the choicest info on the Underground's movements, he didn't know crucial details and Praxis was getting frustrated with him, this could all be a ploy to throw the heat off himself and onto the Underground. Torn wanted to shoot the scheming fuck in the face and bash his head against the wall until he stopped kicking and the walls had a new paint job.

But seeing as he couldn't do that, he continued chain smoking until he was surrounded by butts and had a spectacular tension headache pounding away. It was edging into the fifteen minute zone when the door recognised two members, two members who never seemed to know anything about Haven or its guard or even how the damn city worked. Jak hadn't known he was former KG until he was outright told, as if the tattoos that covered his entire body didn't give it away, it was almost as though the pair had grown up in some little idealistic bubble. But they were the very pair who'd already been out to the pumping station and probably knew what was out there right now, probably knew how to kill anything out there too.

It wasn't like he had any other choice and Ashelin was far more valuable to the underground than most knew, or wanted to acknowledge. He couldn't let her die and if the Precursors wanted to be merciful for once, than who was Torn to look a gift yakkow in the mouth?

After they'd left though, with explicit instructions to get there as fast as they physically could, was when he noticed the mud, the almost dry mud and…flowers. The mud he could overlook, the slums had built up on the edge of the agricultural sector and was nearly always flooded with overflow water. No matter how much concrete or pitch they put down, the water would seep through and crack the roads, creating pot holes and sink holes. There was a lot of fucking mud in the slums, there was mud even when there hadn't been rain in weeks.

He could overlook the mud, it was normal, the flowers, however, weren't. Torn couldn't remember ever seeing a flower in the city, stunted ass trees and genetically altered plants yes but no flowers. The only time he'd seen the colourful little things had been in paper books, outlawed now, and outside the security walls, deep in metal head territory. The last time he'd seen one had been his second to last mission as a captain when the Baron had ordered them out to the forest.

There'd been a metric shit tonne of flowers there, blooming and blossoming in a riot of colour, vibrant blues and warm oranges, fiery reds and dazzling white. The crushed, mud covered things in the hideout remind him of those, huge pointed petals and delicate stalks that looked ready to snap at any second. But who in the blue fuck would go outside the walls to the forest to bring these back?

For all that the forest was a calm, beautiful place, no one made the effort to get there anymore. The pumping station used to be an easy route but ever since the Baron's newest renovations and the encroaching metals, not many people were willing to brave the mountain temple pass. The rocky pass was a perfect place to be ambushed and it wasn't worth losing your life to see a couple trees and grass that didn't smell like yakow shit.

Of course, if you were really dedicated, a person could drop down into the forest by climbing over the rocky almost mountains in the pumping station and praying to the Precursors that they landed in the water when they dropped. And he  _had_  been hearing about increased usage of the old outer wall airlocks, particularly the one to the pumping station which a particular blond had shown quite a bit of interest in.

Of course it could just be the nicotine talking and he was wrong, completely wrong, because Jak was a punk kid that wore this city like a fucking shirt. He knew all the ins and outs, the best way from point A to point B and all the hidey holes in between, even if he didn't know shit about how it was run. Yeah, Torn was probably wrong, probably not the same flowers he remembered, probably weren't even flowers

The blue petals seemed to judge him as he tossed them in the fire and scrubbed his shoe over the dirt.


	3. He can't have this, he shouldn't want it.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes he thinks the kid does this shit on purpose. Finds the one way to piss Torn off so thoroughly because words sure as fuck weren't going to work. Shit he's so tired.

Members had been shuffling in and out of the Hideout all day, ducking in to hide from passing patrols or to catch a few minutes rest. The city’d been on high alert ever since Jak had climbed his scrawny ass up to the Palace and fought the Baron and it’d been complete hell trying to plan around the increased guard presence. Even the god damn kid, the heir to the fucking throne was on edge, his way too big blue eyes wider than usual as they flitted from one thing to the next, never settling and making everyone more anxious than they already were.

If Jak showed his smug little ass here any time soon, Torn was going to shoot him, he most definitely would.

He had the Shadow breathing down his neck to meet the person that fucked Praxis over so royally on one side and he had Erol howling for blood on the other. Just to keep the peace between them he’d had to go out himself and deliver payments or pick up information and he was exhausted beyond the point of collapsing but he couldn’t stop yet. As if they could sense the unease in the city, Metal Heads had been moving closer and the Baron was sucking his own dick by keeping patrols focussed on the city itself. Already they’d made it as far as Dead Town unchecked and he needed to do something about it before they broke through the walls again.

Shit was as bad as Torn had ever remembered it and he was five seconds from snapping and shoot something when the kid made his way back to the hideout after shuttling their people around the city. Jak and Daxter were all satisfied smirks as they tramped in and he was so fucking pissed that he’d reached a new state of Zen. He wanted to shoot the kid in the head, watch the blood and brain matter paint the wall a new shade of fucked up but he needed the kid. The _Underground_ needed the kid, Torn didn’t need the kid, the kid was expendable, disposable to him. 

And Jak thought he was such hot shit well why not give a reason to believe it? Fuck, if he could protect the Sacred Site then he might even have Torn on his side. If he could protect the Sacred Site then Torn would have an excuse to like the kid, an excuse to...he’d have an excuse.

“Hey, I’m probably wasting this but here’s a vulcan barrel for that pea shooter of yours. Believe me, you’re gonna need it,” he muttered though it was as much of a warning as he was willing to give at the moment. The pair spent a couple minutes attaching their new upgrade and hefting it around before they were out the door again, one less problem for him to worry about.

Another few hours passed, more rebels came and went and still Torn worked on, not stopping for fear he wouldn’t start again until next week. He was dead tired, almost asleep on his feet and his knuckles were screaming in dull pain from punching a man in the face while running from a patrol. It took work to actually get up under the face guard and even then the face wasn’t the ideal place to hit but it was the best he’d had at the moment.  He was nearly sure some of the blood crusted on his knuckles belonged to the unlucky guard.

The kid was still hanging around the place, Kor hadn’t been able to take him since the guard patrol had been increased but at least he wasn’t being a little nuisance. Mostly he kept to himself, playing silent little games and carrying things back and forth when members were too sore to get it themselves. When Torn took out his scarf, intent on soaking it in a bucket of cold water mixed with diluted green eco, the kid snatched it up and toddled over to the bucket himself. The bucket was nearly bigger than the kid but he did a pretty good job of soaking the scarf but he was hopeless at knots, his child’s fingers completely inept at delicate work. 

Torn took the scarf and wrapped it securely around his knuckles, binding it as well as he could with his non dominant hand, he thanked the kid of course and gave him a ration bar to go gnaw on. It must’ve been well into the night by the time he moved from behind his desk, stretching for the first time in hours and decided maybe he should take a quick walk to the mouth of the alley. He’d gotten a short message from Jak confirming they’d wiped out the Metal Heads and were off doing something else for the night. They **_were_** coming in tomorrow though and expected answers about the Sacred Site, Torn’d already put the call in to the Shadow and could hardly wait for that shit storm to hit and inevitably blow over.  

The flow of members through the hideout had gently tapered off until even the kid had been toted away by Kor and Torn was the only one left in the quiet room. In the dead air of the room, silent for the first time in hours, his exhaustion towered over him like an impossible tidal wave and threatened to drag him under unless he moved. He needed to move otherwise he’d slump over his desk right there and black out for Precursors knew how long which he couldn't afford to do. Shit there was so much he couldn't afford to do, so much he couldn't afford to have.  

The moon was high, nearly directly overhead as he took his time walking along the alley, sticking close to the wall in case he stumbled. It was probably the only reason he saw it, glinting dully in the moonlight and half hidden by an uneven jut of wall. The...thing was oil slick black, meaning it was so black it _shone_ with a rainbow of colours, it was also about half the length of his forearm and looked like a crooked cylinder.

“The fuck is this?” he grunted, dropping into a stoop and poking at it with his knife, the tip came away covered in the same black blood that had stained his scarf and a vague restlessness began to creep over him. There was the faintest scent of eco, so faint he half thought he’d imagined it because the blood reminded him of the scarf. But he couldn’t have imagined this, the sharply sweet scent of burning and electricity, sweet like a body decaying and electric like burnt out fuses and smouldering buildings. 

“I’m dreaming, I passed out on the desk and I’m dreaming crazy shit,” he grunted as a hand, **_his_** hand, reached out for the thing without his command or permission. His fingers curled around it and he almost dropped it immediately because it was fucking freezing, so cold and devoid of heat that the skin of his palm blistered instantly. Cursing under his breath, he reached out with the hand completely wrapped up in red cloth and picked up the thing with his fingertips, as though it was about to bite him.

It was segmented or chipped all the way around at intervals, each segment thinner than the last until one end came to a dull point while the other was jagged like it’d been broken off at the base. Torn carefully ghosted his uncovered fingers over it and snatched his hand away again because the thing felt like a bone, hard and rough and dry where it wasn't tacky with blood. A bone which meant it could only be one thing, a horn, though what kind of creature would have a black horn and black blood and be able to get this far into the city Torn didn’t even want to imagine.

He’d show it to the Shadow, get his input on it and if the man didn’t know anything about it then he’d show Erol. So Torn forgot about his walk and ducked back into the hideout, fully intent on finding out **_what_ ** the flying fuck this horn belonged to.

Not even fifteen minutes later though and he was hotwiring a zoomer, off to meet Erol for some important intel on the Baron’s latest dark eco experiments. By the time he got back, two hours later and one stomach emptier, he didn’t want to show the horn to the Shadow anymore. In fact, he’d like to find a nice dark pit to throw it into, back into the darkness from whence it came or some such bullshit but he couldn’t risk anyone else finding it so...

So he locked it away and hoped Jak never went snooping around in the mostly empty ammo kits because he didn’t think there was a proper way of saying ‘Oh yeah, that’s just your broken horn that I found in the gutter and decided to keep’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, Jak's horn in the gutter, fun. Check out the other part written in Jak's pov to find out how it got there.


	4. It's about her, please, it's about her.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Torn is the spy. Torn was the spy.

He never meant for any of this to happen. The Baron wasn’t supposed to have ever known, _he’d_ been so careful, **_Ashelin_** had been so careful but in the end it had never mattered. Erol had found out, somehow he’d found out, and of course he’d reported back to his precious Praxis to save his own skin. And Torn hadn’t had any choice, Ashelin was too important, not just to him but the Underground movement as a whole. They couldn’t continue without her resources or her intel, he couldn’t let her be killed, even if it was just a fake out Torn couldn’t take the chance.

He’d made the easier of two hard as fuck choices and still lost, now the Shadow and Tess and the Heir to Haven’s throne were all gone. He couldn’t even assemble a rescue team yet because of how badly the rest of the Underground had been scrambled, everyone gone to ground or even ducked outside the security walls, more willing to brave the metals than the guards. This was the biggest move against the rebellion Erol had ever staged, a twofold attack that took out the head and the body of the beast. His best people were holed up somewhere, waiting out the latest alerts while the new Amber Guard patrolled the streets, their armour twice as strong as their Krimzon counterparts while their blasters didn’t have a safety setting.

Not to mention just how foolish the Underground movement would look now, the people had finally found a reason to believe in them and to support their cause more and more openly. _Jak_ had given the people a reason to hope and a symbol to look to, and Erol had dashed that hope to bits. If Haven’s devil, ~~_hero_~~ , couldn’t keep his allies safe then who could? What was the point if even the most dangerous, powerful, impossible person you could fathom, couldn’t save himself?

It was like Dead Town all over again, back when it used to be Ultsar Street and Jeering Alley and Back Chain Street and Idol Street and a few dozen more childhoods that had been lost, cut off and left to die. Torn had been at the head of charge, leading his people into what was supposed to be the protection of their homes, of their childhoods. So many of the guards in his platoon had been Slummies, men and women he’d fought with as a child in their idle street gangs.

Every single person, each and every one of them had gone in with the firm belief ‘We are going to stop them. We are going to fight. And we are _going_ to win.’ They’d grown up on those streets, knew each other by face if not name and they’d all joined for the same reason, the reason they’d all fought to the front line when the call came through. They’d fought deep into the night, attacking and counterattacking, retreating and advancing, putting up barriers and breaking them down as the hours marched by and the hordes of metals had just kept coming.

Torn had called for reinforcements so many times, over and over again until his communicator had to verbally announce the disconnection from the mainline. He and his people had fought and died for a city who’d already designated them as collateral damage, who hadn’t even bothered to update them on their left for dead status. At the time Torn had thought it was some kind of mistake, the transmission being scrambled by the new security wall and eco shield. He’d snatched up a comm from an injured captain, put in the rush access call and waited, and waited, and waited, in his dreams he was still waiting.

By the time he’d called the full squad retreat more than two thirds of his men were dead, a half of the remainder unable to move on their own. The few of them who managed to hobble back to the security wall, less than a score of people, had had to wait for the new access doors to recognise them as Haven citizens while the metals massed another attack. When they’d gotten back, he’d scattered them all, told them to head to the civilian medics and keep off the radar until he called them. Even then he’d known, even if it was just some insignificant little piece screaming at him to use common sense, to realise what had happened.

As a Haven Guard Captain, he’d gone to talk to Praxis, Ashelin had stopped him from walking to his death and sent him back. She hadn’t been able to stop him from walking into the angry mob, hadn’t been able to stop them slitting his throat but she had gotten him to the only person who could help. She’d gotten him to a man he’d been hunting like a damn kangarat and then that man had convinced him to play for another team. The man who'd repelled the Metal Head attack in the newly christened Dead Town, the one who'd saved his life twice. 

He’d sat by the last time, waited until the last seconds before he realised it was time to call a retreat, time to reconsider his life choices and loyalty to the deceitful. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. When Jak found him, Torn had just about psyched himself up to try storming the prison on his own, no real strategy and no backup plan.

There were still a few members nearby that he could collect on his way, they might make it as far as the cells but beyond that he had no idea. Communications didn’t work in the palace and without an outside force coordinating and drawing most of the guard attention, there was no way they’d be able to get back out. This was also going on the assumption that the Prison hadn’t been renovated since his own early days as a rookie running the prison beat or since their latest map of the building. Their latest map being six months old. 

So when Jak and Daxter offered to go in there, to go _back_ in there, to break out _again_ , he couldn’t believe it. These two **_kids_** had risked so much for the Underground already, saved their hides time and again and they were both willing to go back to a place that must have some nasty memories attached for a cause they didn’t even believe in. It was the only reason he made it about Ashelin, made it out that he was in love with her and couldn’t stand to lose her. It was the only reason he took all the blame in a way that no one could explain or excuse because they didn’t deserve his half assed justification, neither of them did.

Torn didn’t deserve their understanding or forgiveness or anything they were willing to offer. He’d fucked up and he was willing to accept it wordlessly.

Jak and Daxter left and Torn left behind them. They’d need cover, something to distract the rest of the guards while they stormed the prison and Torn knew just the people to call. He nearly face planted tripping over a skull gem as he scrambled for the supplies he’d need for something this big. The gem was the biggest he’d ever seen and pulsed with its disorienting inner light, almost beautiful in a sick way. If he had to guess, he’d say the gem came from a rhino or an octo metal, and somehow that comforted him.

Those things were huge, mean fuckers, that Jak and Daxter could accidentally leave a gem from one of them behind was reassuring in a way. He shoved the gem in a ration box and carried on with his prep, he’d give it back when they got back, because they would, they most definitely would.

“Hey Jinx, how fast can you rig a guard barracks to explode?”


	5. The healing power of Crystals.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What healing power? Exactly.   
> And so Torn isn't the douchebag we thought he was and the Shadow's taking on a bigger role than before. Must leave old Torny boy with a lot more free time, wonder what he does with it.

Nearly an entire month had passed since the break out at the prison and Torn hadn’t seen Jak or Daxter since. Ever since the Shadow had taken a more visible role in the Underground, he wasn’t needed as badly and because of all the trouble Jak was causing, fewer guards that knew him by face weren't running foot patrol or even on hellcat detail. He could take delivery details and escort missions again and he had to admit, it felt good to get out of the hideout more than once a day, get to stretch his legs and get to learn the streets again.

Plus when his deal with Erol went south, the Underground had managed to come out on top, barely. As he didn’t have to give fortnightly reports on rebel activities anymore, they were able to move a lot more freely with less fear of guard intervention. And he didn’t have to create strategies to counter his own strategies or calculate Erol’s strategies based on the information he'd given and create even more complex plans to counter _those_.  Although it did mean more casualties when the guards _did_ manage to disrupt their missions and a lot of them hadn’t taken too kindly to the Underground blowing up their barracks. Still, the rebellion was getting further than it had in years and Torn was happy, even though he had to sell out his friends to get here.

“One Kras whisky,” Tess announced with her signature giggle, slipping him a piece of paper as she leaned over to give him the mug. Another benefit of being back in the field was that he could check up on his people a lot more than he had been able to before. He made it a point to stop at the Hip Hog every night or every other night to check on Tess and trade information. So far, he’d learnt that Metal Head movement in the Wastes had increased significantly while areas directly connected to the city like the pumping station or the strip mine had been abandoned.

“Thanks sugar,” he replied with a lecherous grin on his face, Krew might not be hanging around at the moment but his muscle was. He made a show of taking a deep drink of the watered down alcohol, Tess would never let him drop back into the alcoholism of just a few months ago, while palming the note. He pressed further back in his empty booth and angled his body casually so he could read away from prying eyes.

‘Drill computers down. Meet back’

Crumpling the paper and sticking in one of many pockets, Torn nursed his beer for another ten minutes, noting each patron in the bar. Krew’s muscle hung around the bar, sometimes helping Tess when the crowd surged, but it didn’t look like he was about to leave tonight. Draining the last of the dregs, Torn approached the bar with the same lecherous grin on his face, asking for a refill while eying the blonde woman’s cleavage.

The only thing he could be grateful for was that he’d never met the huge wastelander before so he could easily be mistaken for an off duty guard. When setting up deals with Krew, it had always been through a third party, a third party who was sympathetic to the rebellion and willing to stand in for Torn, the Underground’s prize KG captain with a wealth of inside information. Torn could never have risked Krew knowing who he was. There’d been a bounty on his head for a while there before he struck up the deal with Erol and he’d had no doubts that Krew would’ve turned him in if they’d met face to face.

“So when do ya get off, sweet cheeks?” he asked, deliberately slurring his words and completely ignoring the large man sitting not two feet to his right.

“Well I’m going on break in a few minutes, if you wanna wait...” Tess trailed off, pressing her elbows together and pushing out her chest just that much more. They’d pulled this one before, him being the pervy drunk and she being the slutty bar maid so they could meet somewhere private to talk. The dark skinned man sighed heavily but didn’t interrupt them, apparently he was very used to this. Heh, used to Tess disappearing for a while and coming back gigglier than ever when she was really relaying stolen information back and forth.

“Sure darling, anything you want,” he answered, knocking back more of the piss poor watered alcohol and waited the few minutes until her shift change. When another blond, male this time, took over, they slipped out together and met in a sufficiently secluded corner close enough to the bar that it was pretty obvious what they were doing.  

“The security computers are down? What crazy son of a bitch got in there to do that?” he asked, making sure to bracket the blonde with his arms so to any passerby they would look like any other drunk young couple outside the bar.

“Krew’s people told him it was Jak but they don’t think he knew what the fuck he was doing. He took out the computers but didn’t touch any of the information. Got a comm right after from a familiar id too,” Tess explained, slipping him another piece of paper. There was no way the kid could’ve known what taking out those computers would do, the kid barely knew how money worked, always paying with whole Precursor orbs and being confused as shit when he got more than two hundred pieces in change. There wasn’t a chance he could’ve known what those computers controlled and regulated.

And for all that Jak wanted to burn the city to the ground, he would never endanger millions of people for it. His hatred was for the Baron and the corrupt government, not the mindless citizens, even if he had killed some of them in his...well he’d killed some people but Torn liked to believe the kid hadn’t meant to.

“You know how vulnerable the city is without those computers. Shit’s gonna hit the fan soon, stay safe,” he cautioned, making to pull away so he could go back to inform the Shadow. Those computers were linked directly to the eco grid and all of their powerful security features, without them, the only thing between them and death were the walls. And they all knew the walls weren’t as powerful as they looked, Metals could swarm up and over in less than a day without the eco grid keeping the electrical shocks going.

“Wait, he came in the other day and forgot this. Could you give it to him next time you see him?” she requested, handing over something small before they separated. He watched her sashay back into the bar, making sure she was safe before he looked down at what she’d given him. It was a rock, or well, not a rock, blue eco quartz. You only found the stuff in high altitudes or places with significant amounts of precursor metal and eco vents, white quartz with veins of solid blue eco.

A lot of people believed it improved communication and relieved depressive moods, they even believed the blue eco quartz could heal if it was kept close to the body at all times. Torn wasn’t exactly sure what to make of that, either Jak believed in that mystic bullshit or was pawning semi precious gems that he found outside the city. Both made him strangely uncomfortable, because A) the kid was in some serious shit if he was willing to turn to gem stones for help and B) anyone willing to buy blue eco quartz wasn’t from Haven and very bad news.

Still, he’d promised to return it the next time he saw the duo and he would. They’d get their rock back along with an hour long lecture about safety and knowing when to ask for help. Usually when you were in deep enough shit to pawn things to out of towners or turn to freaking **_rocks_** for psychological relief.

"Damn it kid," Torn muttered as he pocketed the stone, there were a few more places he wanted to hit before he made tracks for the hideout. 


	6. We're...alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you get right down to the nitty, gritty of it, aren't they just two City boys?

Somehow they were alive, somehow they were all alive and they’d  _won_. For the first time in years, too many years, Haven had a victory that wasn't bittersweet. They had a victory that they could savour and celebrate and take the time to look back on with something approaching pride for the first time in more years than most people could count. 

Jak had won them the city and their freedom and Torn was still reeling from it.

The metal heads had broken through the walls and nearly overrun them, they'd tunneled under the streets and come up behind Guard offences to attack from the back. Torn had sent out a scramble signal from the Hideout, a worst case scenario signal that told everyone shit had hit the fan and their only option was to fight or die. He'd contacted Ashelin and then he'd hit the streets with a handful of his people. 

The streets had been hell, the wrecks of Zoomers had burned around them, people had screamed as they were attacked, dragged, bitten,  _eaten_. The slums had always been bordering the water, the safer side of the City, but it was also a weak spot, where the walls didn't run as deep, where the ground was softer and easier to dig through. The Metal Heads had exploited it without hesitation and the Guards were spread too thin to do anything about it.

The scramble signal was supposed to call all available Underground members to the Slums, most of them were slum kids, they'd grown up on these streets and were already risking everything for it. Oh they were risking it for the City, but it was really for the Slums, their homes and their families and everyone the Baron and his damn Council had thrown to the crocadogs. 

The scramble signal had been for Underground members but Torn had forgotten that it was a general broadcast, played on all frequencies and intercepted by all communicators connected to the general grid. By the time he and his few men had fought their way to the bottle neck of the Siv way round about, the one that split traffic in two around the old school house, there'd been fifteen Underground members and ten guards waiting for them. They'd set up a block that protected the entrance of the industrial sector, they'd been able to cover the exit to Dead Town. 

Guards and rebels alike had followed Torn's orders, had fought side by side to protect the civilians. They'd used experimental bombs, and they'd used blasters and knives and any spare piece of wood they could lay their hands on to fight.  Some of the civilians they were protecting had taken up whatever weapons they could cobble together, metal pipes, broken boards, even illegal blasters, and fought with them. People had forgotten about their hatred for the Guard, the Underground, the corrupt city officials, and they'd fought for the City that was theirs against the monsters they all hated.

Long dead street gangs had come together again, old rivalries put to rest, and they'd all fought. 

Then the transmission had come through:

_Jak_ had the Stone.

_Jak_ could get to the Nest.

_Jak_ could save them. 

Torn had gotten in contact with Ashelin while shooting from the cover an overturned market stall and told her what he knew, had asked for her help. They'd coordinated their people into regiments, with Erol dead and her father MIA, she was the next link in the chain of command, and Ashelin had the best strategist in Haven on her side. They'd had their people try to hold back the horde with brute strength, they ran risky manoeuvres that had lost too many good men; guard and civilian casualties had been nearly equal. They'd done all that in the hopes that their last chance hadn’t already died, that their last hope was out there, fighting for them and making all the risks they took worth it.

And they’d been justified, at the end of it all, after all the lives they risked and wasted and lost. They’d been justified. And now here they all were, celebrating and drinking at the newly christened Naughty Ottsel.

What a day.

“How did you two do it?” Torn asked eventually, gesturing at Jak with his beer bottle. The kid was celebrating, the whole city was actually, and even Tess couldn’t deny the ex-KG some real alcohol tonight. Granted Daxter’s version of real alcohol was stronger than most of the cheap shit Torn'd ever been wasted on before and had already put several people on their asses. Eh, it was better for Torn to sip anyway, no blowing through mugs like Krew’s former muscle, Sig.   

“Eh Jak’s more talented than you think. He stormed the nest guns blazing and took ‘em all out. Kor didn’t stand a chance,” Daxter reported proudly, for once telling the story without himself as the hero. Torn could appreciate that but he didn’t doubt the little flea bag had more of a part to play than most people would guess. He knew the value of an extra set of eyes and ears, not to mention an extra set of hands that could aim and fire a gun, when you were deep in enemy territory.

“Mmm, and what about the kid? Last I heard, the Shadow had him and was taking him somewhere safe,” he added casually because, for some reason, he still trusted the old man’s judgement. Even if the old man in question was actually an older version of the man he had worked for, the man who'd saved his life and whom he almost respected. Time travel was insane and he wasn’t about to  _try_  to understand it.

“Uh, yeah, young greenie took him to our village. It’s safe as could be and the kid’ll grow up great there.” The orange animal promised and really who was Torn to question that kind of conviction? There was no doubt that Jak knew exactly where the kid was and judging by how protective he’d been of him before, that little boy was in good hands. Hell, the kid was in the same hands that had saved them all, Torn had no qualms about it, Heir apparent or not that kid was better off far away from Haven. 

“Hey Dax, Tess wants your opinion on something in the back,” Haven’s devil-cum-hero stated bluntly, the ‘leave us alone’ not even implied more like beaten over your head. Of course Daxter, who knew his friend better than anyone, stayed a few more minutes to finish his beer and sing part of a song before leaving. Even then the kid waited until his friend was actually gone before slipping into the booth next to Torn. Torn couldn't help noticing how close the kid was to him, the closest they'd ever been actually, their thighs nearly brushing as they breathed and for once there wasn't an air of tension surrounding them. They were just too guys sitting together, enjoying the one good thing that had happened in a long, long time. It was nice. 

“You want to talk?”

Though it wasn’t so much a question as it was an opening because if there was one thing Torn' learnt about the kid in all the months they’d known each other, it was either you started the conversation or it didn’t happen. And maybe Torn understood part of that blue eco quartz, helped with communication bullshit? Yeah, the kid could use some help in that department, and hey if the kid thought crystals could help. 

“Me and Dax used to collect eco quartz back when we were kids. They actually work but not the way people think,” Jak explained, resting his arm on the table and opening his hand to show a half dozen more pieces of eco veined quartz. One for each type of eco, blue, red, green, yellow, the purple of dark eco and one that was plain white quartz. Each one was about the size of a marble though nowhere near as uniform as something out of a factory, they _were_ clean and polished to a dull shine with a small hole chiselled in the centre. Torn was sure the collective worth of those little rocks was more than his yearly salary as  a Captain in the guard.

“The dark eco quartz’ll trigger aggression if you wear it longer than a week, blue’ll set off hyperactivity, yellow helps with aim, green calms, red causes paranoia,” Jak listed off, letting each one drop to the table with a quiet ' _plink_ '. They both stared at the semi-precious rocks and Torn had a strong feeling that this wasn’t about the eco quartz, more like something along the lines of justifications and explanations. Justifications and explanations of **_what_ ** though, he wasn’t completely sure. Oh he had a few ideas but he wasn't 100% on any of it. 

“I’m not sure what the white one is but it isn’t pure quartz, it works better than green for calming though. I used to keep it on me all the time until Dax told me I would stop breathing in my sleep, said I'd just stop then I'd take this huge breath and keep on sleeping.

I tested it out on a metal frog once. I caught one out by the Mountain Temple and took it to the Forest, nearly dropped it twice but I got there. I tied it up to a tree, stuck one of the rocks down its throat and waited a while. The stone stopped the frog's heart in less than an hour,” Jak said with a shrug. A shrug as though finding a rock that could stop your heart was normal. Torn stared as Jak started picking up each stone and tossing them in the air. He kept adding another and another until all six rocks are in being thrown and Torn still had no idea what this was about. Granted he wasn’t the most intuitive guy around but he generally knew how to read between the lines but this was more like staring at a blank page and willing words to appear on it.

“When we found these back home, we’d hollow ‘em out and keep ‘em on a leather strip. Sometimes we’d give them as gifts, or trade them for something we really wanted.”

And that was some cue to stop throwing the rocks in the air and stare Torn dead in the eye. And he sort of understood what was going on now, Jak and Daxter used those rocks for trade, either literal or as gifts in exchange for affection. Torn almost wanted to ask what the blond was implying but knew better than that. It’s not an implication, it was a suggestion, an offer, a question.

“Well I still have the one you forgot in the Hip Hog, Tess asked me to give it back,” Torn said, reaching into the pocket he’d been keeping the thing in and bringing it out. There was an almost hungry look in the kid’s eyes and Torn was never one to let something, person or animal, starve. Unless it was a Metal then it could fuck off and die. He put the blue eco quartz on the table, pushed it over to Jak’s side and leaned back in the plush cushioning of the bar booth. Torn had played his hand in whatever crazy game he was a part of. Jak's turn.

“You can have all of them, if you want,” the kid murmured, letting the rocks fall back onto the table next to the new one. There was a second of pause as the two of them assessed the situation in its entirety, trying to decide if they really wanted this. Torn was more than ten years older than this devil may care punk kid, he had all kinds of baggage dragging him down and wasn't the greatest person to hang around and be with. Jak was a seventeen year old asshole with a grudge the size of Haven itself, he might not have the same blood lust dancing in his eyes as before but it was still there, simmering away in the blue depths. There were things neither of them would ever be able to say to the other, things they'd never be able to admit to themselves, that was just the way it was. 

However, maybe, maybe this victory really was a turn over, time for something new. Time for the past to get buried, resolved or not, and forgotten as they tried to find a new life to live. A life without the Baron and the Guard or the Underground and the Shadow. 

Torn broke the tense silence first, chuckling in his throat and smiling, not smirking, at the blond brat who grinned in return.

“I’ll keep them for you until you find a place for them,” he said, sweeping each little hollowed out semi-precious rock up and back into his pocket. They didn’t have to speak after that because they’d both already said everything they’d needed to. Torn spent the rest of the night drinking and celebrating a war well won and Jak took the time to relax and enjoy himself for the first time in what had to be years.

If anyone noticed them leaving together in the wee hours of the morning, then they didn’t care or knew better than to stop them.


	7. you were supposed to leave me things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> not leave me.

Somehow they were alive, somehow they were all alive and they’d won. Jak had won them the city and their freedom. Torn was still reeling from it, the metal heads had broken through the walls and nearly overrun them, Guards and rebels had fought side by side to protect the civilians. Some of the civilians themselves had taken up whatever weapons they could cobble together, metal pipes, broken boards, even illegal blasters, and fought with them, long dead street gangs coming together again and fighting for their city.

He and Ashelin had coordinated their people in regiments, tried to hold back the horde, ran risky manoeuvres and lost too many good men. All that in the hopes that their last chance hadn’t already died and they’d been justified, at the end of it all they’d been justified.

“How did you two do it?” he asked eventually, gesturing at Jak with his beer bottle. The kid was celebrating, the whole city was actually, and even Tess couldn’t deny him some real alcohol tonight. Granted Daxter’s version of real alcohol was stronger than most of the cheap shit he’d been wasted on before, it was better for him to sip anyway, no blowing through mugs like Krew’s former muscle, Sig.   

“Eh Jak’s more talented than you think. He stormed the nest guns blazing and took ‘em all out. Kor didn’t stand a chance,” Daxter reported proudly, for once telling the story without himself as the hero. Torn could appreciate that but he didn’t doubt the little flea bag had more of a part to play than people would guess. He knew the value of an extra set of eyes and ears, not to mention an extra set of hands that could aim and fire a gun.

“Mmm, and what about the kid? Last I heard, the Shadow had him and was taking him somewhere safe,” he added casually because, for some reason, he still trusted the old man’s judgement. Even if the old man in question was actually an older version of the man he had respected and worked for. Time travel was insane and he wasn’t about to try to understand it.

“Uh, yeah, young greenie took him to our village. It’s safe as could be and the kid’ll grow up great there,” the orange animal promised and really who was Torn to question that kind of conviction? There was no doubt that Jak knew exactly where the kid was and judging by how protective he’d been of him before, that little boy was in good hands.

“Hey Dax, Tess wants your opinion on something in the back,” Haven’s devil-cum-hero stated bluntly, the ‘leave us alone’ not even implied more like beaten over your head. Of course Daxter, who knew his friend better than anyone, stayed a few more minutes to finish his beer and sing part of a song before leaving. Even then the kid waited until his friend was actually gone before slipping into the booth next to him.

“You want to talk?” though it wasn’t so much a question as it was an opening because if there was one thing he’d learnt about the kid in all the months they’d known each other, it was either you started the conversation or it didn’t happen. And maybe Torn understood part of that blue eco quartz, helped with communication? Yeah, the kid could use some help in that department.

“Me and Dax used to collect eco quartz back when we were kids. They actually work but not the way people think,” Jak explained, opening his hand to show a half dozen more pieces of eco veined quartz. One for each type of eco, blue, red, green, yellow, the purple of dark eco and one that was plain white quartz. Each one was about the size of a marble though nowhere near as uniform but they were clean and polished to a dull shine with a small hole chiselled in the centre. Torn was sure the collective worth of those little rocks was more than he’d made as captain in the guard.

“The dark eco quartz’ll trigger aggression if you wear it longer than a week, blue’ll set off hyperactivity, yellow helps with aim, green calms, red causes paranoia,” he listed off, letting each one drop to the table. They both stared at the semi-precious rocks and Torn had a strong feeling that this wasn’t about the eco quartz, more like something along the lines of justifications and explanations. Justification and explanation of what though, he wasn’t completely sure.

“I’m not sure what the white one is but it isn’t pure quartz, it works better than green but it’s just as dangerous as dark but opposite, it makes you more and more calm until your heartbeat slows. I tested it out on a metal frog, tied it up and stuck one of the rocks between the rope, its heart stopped,” Jak continued, picking each one up tossing them in the air. He kept adding another and another until all six rocks are in being thrown and Torn still had no idea what this was about. Granted he wasn’t the most intuitive guy around but he generally knew how to read between the lines but this was more like staring at a blank page and willing words to appear on it.

“When we found these back home, we’d hollow ‘em out and keep ‘em on a leather strip. Sometimes we’d give them as gifts, or trade them for something we really wanted,” and that was some cue to stop throwing the rocks in the air and stare Torn dead in the eye. And he sort of understood what was going on now, Jak and Daxter used those rocks for trade, either literal or as gifts in exchange for affection. Torn almost wanted to ask what the blond was implying but knew better than that. It’s not an implication, it was a suggestion, an offer, a question.

“Well I still have the one you forgot in the Hip Hog, Tess asked me to give it back,” he stated, reaching into the pocket he’d been keeping the thing in and bringing it out. There was an almost hungry look in the kid’s eyes and Torn was never one to let something, person or animal, starve. Unless it was a Metal then it could fuck off and die. He put the blue eco quartz on the table, pushed it over to Jak’s side and leaned back in the plush cushioning of the bar booth. Torn had played his hand,

“You can have all of them, if you want,” the kid murmured, letting the rocks fall back onto the table next to the new one. There was a second of pause as the two of them assessed the situation in its entirety, trying to decide if they really wanted this. Torn broke the tense silence first, chuckling in his throat and smiling, not smirking, at the blond brat who grinned in return.

“I’ll keep them for you until you find a place for them,” he allowed, sweeping each little hollowed out semi-precious rock up and back into his pocket. They didn’t have to speak after that because they’d both already said everything they’d needed to. Torn spent the rest of the night drinking and celebrating a war well won and Jak took the time to relax and enjoy himself for the first time in what had to be years.  All this shit

If anyone noticed them leaving together in the wee hours of the morning, then they didn’t care or knew better than to stop them.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Torn couldn’t have said that it had come out of nowhere because it hadn’t. Even before Praxis’ death the council had been clamouring for “ _that dark eco freak_ ” to be executed or exiled. Their “leniency” towards Praxis had come from the man being unable to rein in his misbehaving experiment and their own reluctance to become involved. Because as much as people liked to think the city was a dictatorship, it wasn’t, Praxis was the top dog but there was a whole network of people hell bent on keeping power under their own heel.

The old Baron had been useful to them, someone who understood the way things were supposed to work. He’d been a wonderful poster child for their totalitarian government, something their military could rally around and their citizens could fear without doubt but now he was gone and Ashelin just wasn’t living up to her father’s legacy. So it was better to just get rid of her and what better first step than getting rid of her attack dog?

“The council’s powerful Jak and even after all this, the people still believe in them,” he muttered, worrying at the string of polished beads like it was some kind of rosary. Torn wasn’t a religious man, he believed in the Precursors but that was about it, the rest of his belief was reserved for the young man splayed out on the bed next to him. He’d seen Jak accomplish the impossible, fuck, Jak **_was_** the impossible and Torn believed in him one hundred and twelve percent.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” the blond huffed, staring at the slate grey ceiling, and for all that he sounded nonchalant, Torn knew better. He and the kid were…something, close as fuck yes and they cared about each other, for each other, but he was still hesitant to label it. He wouldn’t say boyfriends because that word was for teeny boppers waiting for the perfect kiss, he couldn’t say lovers because neither one of them really cared about sex but partners was too impersonal.

In the eyes of the public, they were close friends, closer than appropriate and it was only a matter of time before the Council jumped on it. “Unnatural scourge of the Earth! How dare they prance around in public as though they were entitled?!” Oh yeah, Torn could hardly wait for the Council to drop the anti-gay card on them and for the rest of the city to follow suit.

He could hardly blame them, the sheeple that is, Praxis had been pumping them full of homophobic nonsense since he’d gained power, backed by the Council as he was in all things. Before Praxis, the city hadn’t given a flying fuck about sexuality or gender or anything really, everyone had just been trying to earn a decent living. After, they were little more than terrified rats in the walls, squabbling amongst each other, outing their own family in the hopes of being on the Guard’s good side. Haven was a shit house that needed more work than it was worth.

“Did you just _malaphor_ me?” he snorted, letting the beads drop back into the pocket that had become their home. He’d had them cut down to slightly smaller facetted beads and strung on a metal chain though he never wore them, he’d listened to Jak’s warnings about the side effects of long term exposure. The beads had effectively replaced the scarf as his nervous habit though he still had the scarf, admittedly it was tucked away in the former Hideout but he knew where it was so it was a moot point.

“Jinx recommended a couple to me. That one stuck out cause it summed up this shitshow pretty well,” Jak explained, a brief smirk crossing his face before it slipped away again. Nearly an entire year had passed since Kor’s death and still the city suffered. The KG had been disbanded only to rise up stronger than ever, Metal Head attacks were more coordinated than before even if the heavy hitters were out of the game. The FLG hadn’t had the training it should’ve, the people hadn’t been given a reason to see Ashelin as their leader and shit was hitting the fan left, right and centre. Even Jak, the cock sure punk kid Torn’d come to love, was affected by the general depression that had fallen over the city.

The kid was always on edge, angry and despondent in a way Torn had never seen him. His eyes were nearly always closer to that rough animal black he’d seen in the DWP logs than they were to the ocean. His skin was pale under his natural duskiness, and his bones were far more pronounced, an already angular face nearly skeletal. Everyday brought them one step closer to a full blown regression to the creature Praxis had bred into the kid’s blood and if they got that far, Torn didn’t think Jak would be coming back. 

“They want to kick you out of the city and I’m not sure we’d be able to stop them,” he said wishing to hell he still drank because this whole situation was worth a drink or five. Everywhere they turned they were hitting walls, the Metal Heads, the KG, the council, there was no room to manoeuvre and the walls were ready to crush them flat. And Jak, the same Jak that had saved their Precursors forsaken city, was being threatened with banishment or death or worse and there was nothing Torn could do to stop it.

Even working for the Underground and double crossing them for Erol hadn’t been as hopeless as this. There was no one he could appeal to, no one he could bargain or barter with for what he needed and it made him feel so worthless. What was the fucking point of saving the city and becoming Commander of the fucking guard if he couldn’t save one person? What was the point of keeping their relationship private if it was going to be outted sooner or later anyway?

Why couldn’t they steal the time they had left out from under the Council? Why couldn’t they show the people how much they loved each other, why couldn’t they show it to each other with words instead of touches, with firm declarations instead of tentative strokes?

“We’ll figure something out, we haven’t lost yet, right?” but even Jak couldn’t keep up the nonchalant tone and he sounded as hopeless as Torn felt.

“Yeah, and if all else fails, we could let a rabid Daxter at ‘em,” he laughed even though it sounded brittle and fake, they needed a little more laughter in their lives anyway. Torn laughed again, just to show he could, and brought back out the beads, taking the kid’s hand in his and wrapping it around their entwined fingers. They’d stayed like that all night long, laying side by side, holding hands even as circumstance tried to rip them apart, even as the rest of the world plodded on to a morning no one wanted to see.

That conversation had taken place a measly handful of hours ago but everything had changed so fucking fast Torn was sure he had whiplash. They’d got up and went off to their respective jobs. Torn to their new HQ built in the remains of the Arena sector, because the old one was a nasty little hole in the wall, and Jak to Samos to try and find some way to relink to the forest at the very least. The council guards had snatched him before he even made it to the Industrial sector and he’d gone with them because it was the smarter choice. For all that Jak played dumb with politics, he’d known that a forceful arrest would end up with too many people dead, more guards than they could risk and far too many civilians.

The council had gone behind all their backs and sentenced Jak to the wastelands without a trial or hearing or anything. Ashelin hadn’t even gotten the call to escort him out until five minutes before they left and that hadn’t even come officially but rather as a general call to the transports for important news. When Torn got wind of it he had tried, **_he’d fucking tried_** , to exercise his power as Commander to get another transport out, to follow them, but the council had already gone over his head and overruled it.

So he’d been left, staring out at the transports and seeing nothing while the signal got further and further away until it blipped out. He started as the transport went out of Haven’s range, out of **_Torn’s_** range. Then he’d reached into his pocket, the one with the beads Jak had given him, only to remember that he’d pressed them into the blond’s hand before he left that morning.

“You’ll fucking make it, you’ll prove them the fuck wrong and come back, you hear me?” he growled, refusing to acknowledge the hot tears welling in his eyes before leaving to set up another assault on the Metal Head city section. Jak was gone but the fight still continued, no matter how much Torn wished otherwise, and he’d always been fucking fantastic at compartmentalising.


	8. A little too good to be true

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jak wasn't dead, he thought, and Ashelin was still alive, he hoped, and back-up was coming, he prayed. All in all, Torn's week has been going well. Oh wait, no, that's not the word, it's been going shit. Yeah, he's been having a bad time.

Torn had half a mind to thank each and every deity in existence when he and his squad finally stumbled into the Ottsel. The other half was hell bent on creating the most inventive and insulting curses in all existence so he could damn each and every deity for doing this to them. He wasn’t a religious man, he _**wasn’t**_ , but Torn needed _someone_ else to blame for a while, at least until he could think more two steps ahead.

He should have pushed harder, forced Ashelin to disband the council the minute she got back from the Wasteland but he’d been angry, fucking furious and on the war path. He’d headed up an assault into the Port, not giving half a shit that Veger’d issued the commands for this one or that Metal Heads and KG robots had both been focusing on the Port. He'd only seen red and a chance to make up some small little thing, he'd wanted to fight and plan and push himself until he passed out. 

Of _course_ they’d been winning, of **_course_ ** they’d managed to push back the Metal Heads into the former agricultural sector since they were confident that their way back was safe. Nearly an entire month they’d worked to keep the Port open and running and somehow they had, barely, but they’d managed to keep new supplies coming into the city. Torn had coordinated attacks and counter attacks with a single minded intensity, anything to forget that Jak wasn’t here, that he’d been exiled out to the wastelands were no one could live for a week much less months. 

The word had come back that Daxter and Pecker had gone with him and Torn had taken a minute to thank whatever powers that be for that, and a minute to curse them. Onin would never have sent her mouth piece to certain death and Daxter knew how to get his way out of anything, those two would make sure Jak came back to him safe. Torn should’ve known better than to slack off during a war though, he’d waited too long to talk to Ashelin and then they’d gotten cut off. Just as he was about to turn his troops back to Freedom HQ, KG bots had rallied and pushed them back through the industrial sector. Then Metal Heads had rallied and pushed them back from the agricultural sector, there was no way through the dark eco membrane and no way around the sniper bots. They'd gotten cut off and had to retreat or die. 

He’d lost a lot of good people as they beat a hasty retreat back into the Port, still believing that the Metal Heads were still scrambled from their last assault that they could get back that way. After being attacked and systematically taken apart, Torn had no doubts about KG and Metal Head cooperation, and as the fucking cherry on the fucking cake, they’d lost all the ground they’d won from the Metals. He’d ordered a complete retreat to the Ottsel; since Daxter had left the place had gone to shit, no one drank in a war zone and no one took care of a place caught in the cross fire but it was something at least. 

“We’ll use this as a Southern HQ, just until we can reconnect with the Governor,” he shouted over the moans and groans of guards that’d been asked for too much for too long. There wasn’t a man between them that didn’t need medical attention, and more than half that needed surgery or an green eco pack, himself included.

“There’s food in the back and bedding upstairs. Everyone that can still walk, head out and scrounge up some health packs, everyone else find somewhere to bed down for the night and someone will come to you,” he ordered, already searching through the med kit behind the bar. Between Jak, Daxter and Tess, the thing was stocked better than some doctor’s kits but Tess was about the only certified surgeon he had on hand. She was holed up at the gun coarse with her own squad, they should’ve been leaving after Torn but they’d ended up covering the leader’s asses in the fall back. 

Tess’ squad hadn’t gotten out of it unscathed and Torn was sure the blonde woman was patching up her own people so he only planned on calling her over if he couldn’t, absolutely **_could not_** , handle it himself. Back in the Underground, Torn used to be the last resort medic; the KG used to have a few first aid courses and if all else failed, an eco pack could always be scrounged or stolen. 

Groaning to himself, he pulled out surgical thread, needles and a couple bottles of Daxter’s finest vodquila, there weren't any eco packs here though. Sure there was morphine in the kit but he only wanted to use that when the alcohol didn’t work, they had no idea of knowing how long they’d be holed up here and they couldn’t afford to run out of supplies so early on. Besides, vodquila was known for its many uses on the battle field; to disinfect wounds, used in place of anesthetic, or to just knock some poor bastard out so the medic could do what needed doing. And if ammo was running low, it made one hell of a Molotov cocktail.

“Commander, don’t you want _that_ looked at first?” a guard asked, on who wasn’t quite steady on her feet, what with the gash at her temple, but steady enough to help her fellows. Torn blinked at her stupidly, he’d been running on an adrenaline high for the last few hours and it had faded seamlessly into complete exhaustion, all that left was a hazy numbness and need to collapse. He barely had feeling in his fingers, probably wouldn’t feel it if someone stabbed a knife through his hand so he had no idea what she was talking about, or rather, didn't want to bully the braincells into figuring it out.

“Your arm, sir?” the guard suggested and when he looked down the sight of flesh ripped to ribbons nearly made him heave. Of course, he’d been tackled to the ground in the fight, a metal had jumped him and gotten its teeth into his arm, he hadn’t thought about it in hours. He'd been fighting around a corner, shooting death bots so his people could focus on the metal heads at their back and a grunt broke through their ranks. Torn had about three seconds to realise there was something running at him full speed as he turned before there were three hundred pounds of muscle and metal forcing him to the ground. The grunt had gone for his throat and Torn had jammed his forearm between its jaws while he scrambled for his gun, one of his men had put a bullet in the grunt's skull and Torn had shoved the dead weight off of himself. He'd snatched up his gun and went on fighting with out even thinking about it. 

Now that he looked at it though, at the place where flesh had been ripped out in nasty looking chunks leaving the layers of tissue and muscle and fat were exposed, he wanted to heave. The skin around the missing meat was pale, it had bled as much as it could and there wasn't anything left there, it'd heal bad since he hadn't treat it in so long and there was no green eco for it but he couldn't see the bone and he could still twitch his fingers. Tess would look at it later and see what could be done but for now. 

“Eh, disinfect it and wrap it tight, it’ll keep until they find some eco,” he directed, fighting down the nausea and panic with sheer stubbornness, he had his people to see to. The woman stared at him with wide brown eyes before hastily doing as he said; the vodquila stung like a mother but it had to be done. For a bandage, she wrapped a fairly clean scarf around his arm before tying it off and tucking the ends in tight. Torn tried not to notice the colour of the makeshift bandage, tried not to remember who else wore a red scarf and failed. He should've probably focused on how much the red scarf made it look like his arm was still bleeding but all he could think about was those first few weeks back when Jak had first joined the Underground. 

The red scarf had been tied poorly, wound around the kid's neck as many times as it could and tucked in. The red scarf had been dirty and smelled faintly of sewer water but every time they got in a fight, every time Torn started shouting because Jak was being a reckless rookie and Jak started snarling because Torn was being hard ass, the scarf had caught his eye. He couldn't remember all the times he'd thought about grabbing that red scarf and using it to drag the blond punk in for a hard, _biting_ kiss. 

“There should be some gauze around here somewhere, find that and we can start patching up our people,” Torn said when the guard was finished with her own head. It had been a long day, a long fight, and promised to be a long night.


	9. Welcome back?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In times of strife and trouble, people usually fall back on old habits. Some people sing old songs, others make childhood foods, Jak starts to leave shit again and Torn starts to find it again. Sort of.

Three months, three months since Jak’s exile and every day Torn still kept expecting the kid to strut into the Ottsel as though their lives hadn’t crashed and burned around them. Never mind that they’d taken down all the trophy heads or that there were constant stockpiles of ammo or that all the alcohol had been used by guards who needed more than they’d ever carried in the bar. Never mind that the Port had been cut off from the rest of the City by Metal Heads and Death Bots and the Ottsel was sorry excuse for a headquarters.

Torn kept expecting to look up and see a blond punk kid swagger in with an orange rat on his shoulder, a smirk on his face who asked ‘Why the long face, old man?’.

Torn could barely go outside and see the Ottsel bar sign out front without wanting to offload a whole clip of bullets in the thing. His people had noticed of course, in between everything else going on around them, his squad had noticed what was going on with him. And they tiptoed around the subject like it was a fucking trip wire for a bullet to the face, or the dressing down of the century. The sad part about it was that they weren’t wrong, Torn would never go so far as to hurt his people because that was just counterproductive to their cause but he would glare at them then maybe disappear for hours.

They weren’t any closer to relinking with HQ than they had been when they first got fucking cut off and at this rate they’d all be dead within the week. If he had three hundred able bodied men at his disposal, he had too many, and even with that many Torn wasn’t sure he could keep the Port during another attack wave. Supplies were still coming in of course; merchants had been persuaded to keep trading with them and sending ammo and food and wares but there was no way to get the new goods to the interior.

All transports were shot out of the sky, ground teams were sniped by advanced turbo canons and no one had returned from the sewers since he couldn’t even remember. Torn had run out of options a month ago when they first made the Ottsel their Southern HQ and since then, things had gotten steadily worse. There was no way to New Haven, no way that his men could find at least.

Jak could’ve found a way though. If Torn’d had Jak by his side, they never would’ve gotten cut off in the first place. If he’d had Jak, he wouldn’t have lost himself to a familiar grief and done some stupid bullshit. If he’d had Jak, so much would’ve been different but Torn didn’t which was the beginning and end of this damned, depressing bitch of a situation and that was the Precursors’ honest truth.

He didn’t even have a picture to remember the kid by and of all the shit the kid had left him, Torn didn’t have a single thing left to his name. He didn’t have a single quartz bead, he didn’t have a flower, or a skull gem; not even the ratty old scarf or a broken off horn. Neither of which Jak even knew about, the first he wasn’t even sure belonged to the kid and the second he could never bring up without sounding half insane.

“Ah, the Naughty Ottsel. Honey, I’m home!” or maybe he was already entirely insane because there was only one person on the entire planet with a voice that annoying. One of the two people that had actually stayed loyal to their hero and gone with him to the Wasteland so there was no way it could be who he thought...flying fucks.

Torn was either hallucinating or passed out cold in the back of the Ottsel because there was no way. There was no earthly way Jak was waltzing into the Ottsel the way he’d imagined for weeks, there was no possible way for Jak to be **_here_**. Ashelin had gone with him out to the desert, Ashelin had said Jak had stayed there while the transport flew back to Haven.

“Jak...I never thought I’d see you again,” Torn muttered and did that come out as desperate and sad and hopeless as he thought he did? Did he sound as relieved and defeated and exhausted as he felt all in the same breath?

Because he gave no fucks, Jak was here, he was fucking _here_ and _alive_ and right **_here_**. He had a healthy looking tan and his hair piled into a ragged bun; his eyes were lighter. Jak’s clothes showed more skin than Torn had ever seen in public and he was pretty sure the kid had the quartz beads and an orange amulet strung around his neck on a leather tie. Somehow Jak had survived the merciless wasteland and came back more beautiful and deadly than before and Torn had no idea how to deal with that.

Jak was just as lean, if not more, but his muscles were defined, not just cable wire but visible corded muscle. His dirty blond hair had bleached out to a brighter ash blond and was pulled back into a very messy bun but you could see the darker green roots so clearly.

…Jak had come back from the wastes and he was _beautiful_. Beautiful in the way lightning storms were, deadly and heartbreakingly distant, distant because Jak had yet to look at him. Would Jak even want him anymore? After Torn had left him to fight his way through the unforgiving wastes, to find his way to a city that was mostly rumour and hearsay?  

And because he didn’t have an answer for that, for the first time in his life Torn was glad for Daxter’s complaining otherwise he would have grabbed the kid and never let go. Jak was here, in Haven, and apparently fighting for them again or at least he was willing to take orders from Torn. So he sent them off on a mission only they could do, never a doubt in his mind that they couldn’t take out the blast bots while he tried to get Ashelin on the horn.

Communications were iffy, sometimes they got through, sometimes they didn’t, it depended on whether or not the bots had been jamming signals or metals had been chewing on the transmitter towers. Although it looked as though having Jak back in the city was having some kind of domino effect on the good things that could happen, communications were up and both enemy fronts were calm. Even reports from his men were more optimistic, the news was already spreading like city fire, ‘Jak was back!’ ‘Jak was on their side!’ ‘Oh thank the Precursors! Jak and Torn’ll get us outta this’.

Torn didn’t turn around at the duo’s re-entry, they’d destroyed the bots that had been a hairsbreadth away from killing them and Torn could never be more grateful. Some of that happiness leached out into his voice when Ashelin finally answered, but again, the pain in the ass known as Daxter made sure he got himself back under control. Jak was back and Torn was over the fucking moon but the city was still in deep shit and he had to keep his composure, for his men.

At least that was the lie he was going to keep telling himself, Torn had to keep it together for his men. They needed him to keep his shit together, even if Jak was back in the City and fighting on their side, there was still so much to do. They still had so far to go before they could even think about winning this war and it was easier to focus on all of that instead of anything else; ~~anyone else.~~

“Care to make some noise, Jak?” he asked because it was what Jak expected from him, it was how they’d been back in the Underground and he’d do anything for some familiarity. From the kid’s reaction he could use some normal too. How fucked was it that explosions and death defying stunts were their normal?

It was only after sending the demolition duo off to take out the barrier the bots had put up that he noticed the strange little _thing_ on the bar. A piece of warped metal, it looked as though it had once been a straight piece but like someone had held it in their hands and half twisted it. On one side there was a blaster mark, the edge jagged and rough, the other had something scratched into it but he couldn’t see it because of the twist. Torn didn’t have to think about who could’ve left it for him.

“C-H-A-N-G-” he mumbled, cutting off when he realised what the word was. Change. There was only one person he knew that could warp metal like this, who’d be under blaster fire, and would’ve taken the time to scratch a single word into old metal.

Jak, who else?


	10. Laugh so you don't cry.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> War is Hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for brief mental instability.

“Commander! Someone’s blown the Metal Head Nest wide open!” a breathless guard shouted as they barrelled into the Ottsel. The guard stopped to pant for a half minute, caught their breath then they were grabbing the nearest ammo and racing back out into the fight. 

The swell of hope in his chest hurt like a motherfucker, ‘ _hope is a thing with feathers_ ’ his mind reminded him and usually things with feathers got shot down, hope hurt and ached. They’d been trying to breach that fucking dark eco membrane for weeks now and never even made a scratch. They didn’t have the right weapons, they didn’t have the right eco, they were cut off from all their equipment and it was fucking depressing.

 “Commander, Commander Torn! It’s Jak! He’s back in the city!” another guard yelled as they snatched a spare gun from the rack and scrambled back out to deal with the waves of metals that were flooding into the Port. Some of them still didn’t believe Jak was back, didn’t believe that their saviour had returned and was kicking ass better than ever. **_Jak_** had broken through the dark eco membrane, **_Jak_** had taken out the blast bots, he’d done so fucking much in what, a week? A week or less and they were deeper into KG and metal territory than they’d been in, in...two months? Two and a half? More?

“Fucking kid,” Torn snorted, chucking a used ammo clip at the twisted, shinning metal he’d been left. He had no idea what it meant, _~~yes he did~~_ ~~,~~ change? Change what? The tide of the war, the types of mission he sent the blond on, change himself? Or did it mean something _had_ changed? Their relationship? Was it that they weren’t...whatever they’d been before Jak had gotten exiled?

Had **_Jak_** changed? Changed so much that he wasn’t the person Torn had fallen in love with over the course of a desperate piece of shit war? Had _Torn_ changed from the man **_Jak_** had fallen in love with? One word wasn’t enough for him to get a grasp on what he was supposed to do because if Jak wanted him to do anything, **_~~any fucking thing~~_** , he’d do it. He owed the kid that much, he owed him a whole shit ton more but he could start there at least.  

He needed to do something about the breach though. Three hundred guards were enough to cover the entrance to the Industrial section and keep the death bots back but were they enough to handle the Metal Head side too? He couldn’t bet on reinforcements any time soon so three hundred would have to be enough to hold it, even through an assault.

Of course if they ever managed to take down that flying war factory, then they might have an actual chance at winning this Precursor’s forsaken war but that was about a hundred steps ahead. Torn needed to plan about five steps ahead before he could even think about that and right now he was waiting for Jak and Daxter to get back. He needed to debrief them, figure out if there were any exploitable breaches in the Metal Head City section and how to get rid of the new nest they were building.

The new nest was bigger than the old one, at least from what they’d been able to gather. The old Nest had never been fully mapped for obvious reasons and the new one couldn’t be but from what they could see of it, the new Nest was colossal. There was no rapid layers like Kor left but there were hundreds of eggs and egg stalks, in a few months the Metal Head army would triple. Really the ideal thing would be if they could take the whole thing out now but they didn’t have anywhere near the man power necessary for a full on assault.

The best they could hope for was-

 “Oi, Cap’n pain in the ass, need a lil help here!” Daxter snarled, voice crackling over the comm but there was something in the rat’s voice that had him on his feet and to the door in record time. The rat was on the ground, curled around Jak’s ankles, Jak who was leaning against the wall just beyond the door looking like death warmed over. There was drying blood around his mouth, dried into the cracks on his lips, and when those lips parted in a pant, Torn could see black veins gums.

Usually Torn didn’t notice what Jak was wearing, ~~lie~~ , but this time it was pretty hard to miss the singed cloth stained with more black. Even as out of it as he was, Jak still had his morph gun out and the fingers wrapped around the handle looked burnt and charred. All in all, the kid looked like he’d caught on fire and someone had done a shit job of putting him out, not to mention the whole exhausted to the point of passing out while standing up thing.

 “Get inside Daxter, I’ll get him,” Torn promised, staring down the rat and losing for the first time since they’d met.

“Not. A. Chance. Jak fucked himself over just to get access to the metal head section of the city. He’s running on fumes and there ain’t a chance in this world I’m gonna leave him now,” Daxter growled, ears low and hackles raised. Torn’d never seen the fuzz ball so riled up and he didn’t doubt for a second that Daxter would commit murder; nasty, **_gory_** murder if anyone tried to take him away from Jak.

“Okay, come up,” he said, crouching down and holding out a hand for the rat to climb up onto his shoulder. Torn took a step to the right to compensate for the new weight, huh, the rat was heavier than he’d expected and now he had to wonder how Jak used a gun with a counterweight on his opposing shoulder. Shaking the thought away, he got a hand around the kid’s waist and a dead weight arm over his free shoulder.

In comparison to Daxter, Jak was lighter than Torn expected. He would’ve thought the time out in the desert, running up and down, fighting for his keep and to earn food would’ve put some weight on that slight frame along with the muscles. As it was, Torn didn’t have too much trouble getting the blond into the Ottsel and up the back stairs to the living quarters.

When he lay the kid on the bed, Jak immediately scooted backwards until his back was to the wall and curled in on himself. Even when completely burned out, he looked as though he was ready to jump up at a second’s notice. Hell in a hand basket, Torn couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Jak this bad, he didn’t think he ever had.

“I’ve never...seen him like that. He asked me if his Uncle was out there in the acid, said he could see the Circus tents and hear gulls,” Daxter muttered keeping put on Torn’s shoulder, trusting that the red head would stay up here with Jak and the rat wasn’t wrong. Torn pulled up an empty ammo crate and sat by Jak’s head, learning what blind loyalty looked like.

Torn had thought he was dedicated, that he’d been loyal to his City and its people but he had _nothing_ on Jak, not one fucking thing. Haven had thrown this kid out like yesterday’s yakkow shit but here he was, fighting for them again. Here he was past all the metal heads and the death bots, against the impossible odds, risking **_everything_** for them, _again_. The Precursors had one fucked up sense of humour.

“Sounds like Heart high, it’s a drug. Junkies liked Purple Heart the best because it made them see all sortsa fucked up shit. Purple heart’s diluted from dark eco and mixed with other shit and has the highest mortality rate of all eco drugs,” he rambled, not even sure his sentences made any sense. Torn was too busy remembering back when he was just a rookie and Purple Heart had first hit the streets.

Heart had been a new about thirteen years ago; when it first hit the streets it was just known as a more concentrated form of dark eco drug, came in a powder that you could mix up with some water, or other eco of choice, then inject straight into your veins. Others chose to snort it but shooting up was the preferred method of doing Heart in Haven. Haven back then wasn’t the shit hole it was now, Haven back then was a metropolis that other cities loved to trade with, their industries used to be booming.

“High rate of addiction to match the mortality rate. Started out with the name Purple Haze but it changed when people started dying. Druggies went nuts for the shit after that, people dying from a drug just means it’s purer dope. Decided to call it Purple Heart because it took some serious balls to be on Heart all the time, one bad trip and you’d probably end up dead,” he scoffed, feeling the familiar laughter bubbling up in his throat but he smothered it with a cough. Here he was, sitting on an ammo crate while Jak slept off possible Heart Burn, telling Daxter about the local drugs in an attempt to make himself feel better, it was fucking hilarious. ~~No it wasn’t.~~

Torn’d seen people strung out on Heart, they’d see metals eating their loved ones, swear there were _things_ under their skin that they needed to _get_ **_out_**. Once, a woman on Heart had stolen a hellcat, bashed the driver over the head with a chair leg until he went down, and shot up a clothing store before slitting her own throat with a piece of broken glass. Witnesses claimed she’d been screaming about the evil living within the clothes, of the corruption and infection dwelling in the heart of the material.

“Jak’s...addicted to eco, dark eco. Praxis had him on it for a near two years straight and after he killed Kor, it got harder for him to get his eco fix from metal head blood. We used to meet Jinx all over the city for syringes already full of Heart,” Daxter murmured, blunt claws digging into Torn’s skin through his clothes but he didn’t say anything. Torn could tell that Daxter was only telling him this because he thought Torn deserved some kind of explanation. 

“I knew about the eco addiction. Me and Ashelin went collecting all the info we could on the DWP and found records of it in a doctor’s report. We burned all of it.”

Every written page, every piece of information on data stock, hours of video, two years’ worth of personal journals and notes and official reports. Torn and Ashelin had gone through it all personally, painstakingly taking it off the main servers and wiping the terminals as they went. At the end of it all, they’d been left with a pile of computer chips, flyaway notes they’d bound together and real paper books then they’d doused it all in gasoline and watched the flames burn high as it all went up in smoke.

Maybe they should have saved the information, after all, it wasn’t like Praxis had failed and the amount of new knowledge gained from the DWP was incredible. There was so much more to learn about dark eco and maybe they could have kept a backup data storage to help with further research but no. Jak deserved better than that and there was also the matter of the Council.

The Council had known about the program; how could they not know about the DWP when they’d sanctioned it? They’d helped **_fund_** the fucking thing so the Council more than knew about the Dark Warrior Program. What they hadn’t known was that Torn could act as fast as he did, within two weeks all that was left of the DWP was Jak and a handful of people from the program staff. He’d thought it’d be enough to keep the Council from throwing his-from throwing Jak out, he’d been wrong.

“Does he know that you do?” Daxter asked; voice hard again and there was the hysteria scratching at Torn’s throat, ready to burst out and demand everyone’s attention. He needed a drink, a stiff one, he needed a smoke, he needed hope, he needed some fucking help.

“Yeah, told him I did. He asked me if it was going to be a problem, I said no,” Torn sighed, running his hands through his hair, tugging hard. He should be on the horn, ordering his men, negotiating with reluctant merchants and getting supplies into the city but he wasn’t moving an inch. Ashelin could walk in right that second and order his ass back out there and he’d tell her exactly where she could shove her orders.

“Good, never thought I’d hafta give you the shovel talk Torn. Nice to know I wasn’t wrong,” Daxter admitted uncurling from Torn’s shoulder and jumping onto the bed where he made himself comfortable in the crook of Jak’s shoulder and neck. Torn wanted to say something about how it was a little too late for a shovel talk seeing as they were already technically together. Or were they? Were they still whatever they’d been after the whole exile to the wastes to die thing or was that considered all part of the dating game?

And _there_ went the laughter he’d been trying so hard to keep down, it started soft, quiet, a chuckling under his breath that no one ever heard meaning he had ten seconds before shit hit the fan.

Torn got up and _ran_. Bolted out the door and down the stairs, vaulted the bar into the back room that used to house alcohol but had first aid kits, ammo, and one crazy fucker nowadays. He couldn’t help it, the hysterical, frantic laughter came out whether he wanted it to or not, escaped through his fingers when he pressed his hands over his mouth. It slipped through cloth gags and echoed inside his head when he forced his face into the hard mattress of the hideout cots. He could never stop it, no matter how hard he tried, he could never stop.

“Sick, messed up, crazy piece of _shit_ Torn Rhett,” he hiccupped, the nasty, snickering laughter bouncing back at him.

“He’s upstairs, half dead, more? And you’re laughing like some weird ass, I really am a bastard,” his whispered, brain to mouth filter in ragged shambles around him. He was as burned out as Jak, with all the land they were recovering he’d had to lead his squads deep into bot territory to make the reclaimed land didn’t have too many surprises waiting for them. He was running on fumes between coming up with half successful strategies and directing his people in the thick of it.

He was making runs whenever he could and he’d been snorting blue eco to keep himself awake for days. He was burning bright and burning fast and now Jak was sleeping off his own Heart Burn and everything was just so fucked.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he cackled, slumping against a wall and throwing an arm over his eyes. Fuck, fuck, fuck.


	11. Electrify Me

“We need five patrols out there daily, no less than five men at any time. Now we’ve got the nest open doesn’t mean we can sit back on our asses. I want to start putting together a team to start the city recovery program and if we’re going to have a hope of that, I need five fucking men on the barrier every hour on the hour!” he shouted. Here they were up shit creek and the Council was still blocking every advance he tried to make, now they were arguing the point of putting men in high risk areas. The whole god damn city was a fucking ‘ _high risk_ ’ area, they were at war!

Their god damned Palace had been bombed to shit and more than half their territory had been captured by the enemy, the land they did have was less than a sixth of their original land. The FLG had been cobbled together from KG cast offs, the few who’d been in the guard against their will and chosen to reenlist had been untrained, mostly those who’d joined on in the latter years of Praxis’ reign. Even their goddamned HQs were divided between the south and north of their remaining territory and couldn’t communicate with each other. If there was ever a situation more ‘ _high risk’_ than this one, Torn would eat his fucking knife.  

“Commander Rhett, I would watch my tone if I were you. This Council is doing everything in its power to ensure this city does not fall to those rouges and monsters,” Councilman Quil complained and never more did Torn wish he could reach through holocoms and strangle the people on the other side. Not even when Jak had gone against his commands while the Underground was still a thing, and there’d been some close calls back then, did he want to commit mass murder but the Council was pushing him towards that edge.

“This city is going to fall to **_Krimzon Guard_** _robots_ and **_Metal Heads_** unless we get up off our asses and do something about it. I am **demanding** more guards put under my command so long as the southern base remains in the Port and we are cut off from Freedom HQ,” he ground out, clamping his jaw shut to stop himself from starting an all out shouting match. He knew from experience that he could yell himself hoarse and it wouldn’t get anything close to being done because the Council was made of sanctimonious pricks ten times worse than Praxis.

“We are unable to spare anymore men at this current time without stretching our own guard too thin. You will have to make do with what you have Commander Rhett,” Councilman Mir answered in a final sort of way that had him cutting the transmission off. Every time he tried to get in contact with Ashelin those bastards would intercept his call, he couldn’t get through to her and with the increased activity he was picking up on scanners he needed all the help he could get.

“Commander Rhett, incoming attacks from both the metal and bot fronts. All squads are overwhelmed and civilians are already in the crossfire,” his current second in command reported, the same woman who’d helped him patch up their people when they’d first gotten stuck in the Port. And **_that_** was why he needed extra men, his scouts had started reporting new movement from the bots while the metals occupied most of their attention with the new breach. Jak getting the barrier down had been needed but they were nowhere near equipped to handle the resultant surge, they were dead.

“It’s because of the eco shipment we’ve got coming in,” he grunted, shoving himself away from the dead comlink and getting out front. They’d released as many decoys as they’d had into the Port and Jak had destroyed most of them, trying his best not to turn into a fireball. Ashelin had authorised the nab and grab, she’d thought they had more resources than they did and believed everything her Council told her. They needed to link back up to HQ, they fucking needed to before there wasn’t anyone left to link up with.

“We need another decoy, Sir we need another decoy before the Commander gets here!” Mira shouted, eyes wide as they both tracked the bulky transport across the Port. There were two missiles left and only one decoy still standing and not a chance they’d be able to rig a decoy before the blond went boom. No, Torn couldn’t lose Jak again, he couldn’t. Wasn’t it enough that the kid had been _exiled_ , presumed **_dead_** , without Torn having to see him die right in front his eyes?

“No, I’m not losing him again, get Jinx on the horn now!” he barked, ducking back into the bar and digging through the boxes and boxes of used ammo clips and jammed blasters. There had to be something left in this heap of shit, something he could jury rig to save Jak, anything!

“Our boy’s dealing with heat seekers here Commander. You get something nice and hot out there and the little birdie should go after the sparkly toy,” Jinx explained over a shaky, static-y comm. And Torn knew they were dealing with heat seekers, how the fuck couldn’t he when he’d thrown heat emitting decoys out there?

“We don’t have anymore decoys!” he yelled, flinging a dead gun at the wall hard enough to put a hole in it. Wires sparked and sizzled angrily, and the lights dipped before regulating itself again meaning he’d hit something important. Based on the startled shouts he heard from outside the bar sign had blipped too, or maybe sparked off and a fire was the last thing he needed on top of all this.

“Last decoy down, Sir!” Mira shouted, the desperation thick in her voice though she tried to hide it. And the power fluctuated again, plunging him in darkness one second and blinding him with light the next, shit was fucked and he had no idea how to fix it.

“Get something bright and hot out there now Rhett! A firesparker, an overloading gun, something!” Jinx ordered and the fear was creeping in, closing in on him. The lights dipped again and there was the scent of smoke from somewhere, the fuses probably five seconds from frying themselves. They’d have a fire in the HQ and a missile on the front porch.

“The bar sign, we’ll use the bar sign as the last decoy!” Torn yelled, not caring about electric shock as he grabbed the exposed wires and worked on rigging the bar sign. He’d only ever had a cursory understanding of house wiring, all of his knowledge learned from Vin and only ever applied to hotwiring zoomers but it was the same basic principle. And he wasn’t doing anything fancy here, he just needed to divert all power to one place and he had enough access to do that from the hole in the wall.

“Sir, Oli knows about wiring, he can take over,” Mira explained and he didn’t wait, he trusted his people and he needed to get out there. If Jak was going to go out in a flaming wreck, then Torn was going to be right there to jump into the fires with him.

“Full brightness!” he commanded, snatching the comm someone was using to talk to Jak and explained their plan. It would be close, closer than anything they’d ever attempted in the Port before, there was no room for a do over if the kid over shot the bar, no time either.

“Do or die time, come on,” he muttered, whether to himself or to Jak he didn’t know. Seeing a bulky eco transport fly over his head, seeing the undercarriage of the zoomer as it curved upwards and then the missile following after divert at the last second was the closest he’d ever gotten to Jak’s insane-fuck miracles. Throwing his hands up to cover his head as flaming debris, embers and searing metal raining down, all that was left of the heat seeker and bits of the bar sign, was the closest he’d gotten to seeing his life flash before his eyes in a while.

This crazy stunt was also the closest Torn’d ever been to Jak during an actual mission, during real war, and it was vastly different than the lazy feats the kid always pulled. There was laser sharp focus in those darkly blue eyes, a tenseness between his shoulders as he threw his whole body against the steering wheel, dragging the vehicle up and over through sheer willpower.

The missile had taken the bait and destroyed the rigged sign instead of locking on the eco signature and following through and somehow no one was dead. Somehow Jak and Daxter weren’t steaming piles of biomass and Torn’s people were all celebrating their brief win but there was more work to do. There was always something more.

“Drop the transport round back and report to the Ottsel, we’ve got another problem,” he reported, his voice thin and distant. He was in shock, complete shock, and he was pretty sure the tingling in his fingers was from the residual adrenaline thrumming through his blood but it could just as easily be the electricity he’d been zapped by. He should probably see somebody about that, get some eco on it before there was permanent nerve damage or some shit.

“Commander Rhett, enemy forces closing ranks. Civilians in bolt holds, awaiting orders to engage,” his head squad captain reported. And this was going to be it, wasn’t it? If they couldn’t repel this wave, or even weather it then they were done for and all the fighting and pain and death would’ve been for nothing. Their forces were divided in nearly half, Ashelin wouldn’t be able to hold her lines if they broke and the rest of the city would fall. 

“Form ranks, UL formation and wait for my signal. We hold the lines, do not push for more ground and do not over extend. We hold the lines until we don’t need to or we can’t,” he explained darkly. Torn had his own strategy, he’d fight his way into the thick of it, help push back until men could be spared then lead those men to other parts of the fight. That way he could relay orders, see everything from the ground and actually feel as though he was making a god damn difference for once.

And he had Jak, if nothing else, he had Jak to fall back on. The man could do anything, work a miracle and if there was ever a situation that needed a miracle more it was this one. This assault could wipe them out once and for all, shit hadn’t been this bad even when the metals had breached the security walls back under Praxis; Dead Town and the Kor breach included.

So he sent the man he’d only just gotten back from the wastes out into the toughest fight they’d ever encounter. He named Jak his ‘go-to guy’ and never once said what he would be doing during the attack, never even hinted that he would be out there too. Because Torn knew Jak, the sentimental fool that he was would probably break rank to find Torn in the chaos, try to protect him and wind up costing them the battle. No, better that the kid think he was still sitting back on his ass, calling the shots from his cushy bar booth just like he’d done while in the Underground. Never mind that he’d only stayed his ass in the hideout to avoid being shot or captured, sometimes it was better when Jak didn’t understand shit. And Jak sure as fuck didn’t deserve to hear his excuses.

“If we lose this one, we’re history,” he muttered, quietly, softly because as much as he wanted to believe they’d get out of this one, that Jak would get them out of this one, Torn was a pessimist by nature. And as a natural pessimist, he didn’t want his last words to the man he loved to be about this war but he didn’t have a choice so he could at least make his last words sound good. He could even out the gruffness, lower the pitch, pretend they were in their Palace bedroom and not here, readying themselves for war and death.

“Then I won’t lose,” Jak replied smugly but there was a note of utter self confidence, the tone the blond took on when he didn’t want to look too close at his actual feelings. The wasteland might’ve mellowed the kid out some, sanded the rough edges smooth and helped calm the raging anger boiling just under the skin but Jak was still Jak. _Other_ people talked about emotions and hopes and dreams, his own were never important and feeling that way made him so angry because Jak knew he deserved more but he also didn’t. And he hid it all away with a cocky smirk and a smug one liner to avoid the vicious cycle of condescension chasing its way around his head.

Torn watched as the blond retreated, back straight, the tension from the chase through the Port still evident in the hard line of his jaw and the kid had never looked as heartbreakingly gorgeous than he had in that moment. Torn stared with vacant eyes until the door slid shut and he was left alone in the bar again with nothing more than a faulty comm and...

A faulty comm and his beads. His beads strung together on a thin steel chain, each one perfectly smooth and exactly the way he’d remembered. Fuck


	12. War Never Changes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Torn's seen some shit, he's been through some shit and he knows what shit looks like. This assault? This is some yakkow shit if he's ever seen it, this assault is the worst he's ever been through. The "assault" ha they might as well call it the Battle for Haven because Precursors if this isn't a battle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Graphic depictions of blood and gore. Also Torn's PTSD.

There was thunder and lightning and enough rain to drown a lurker shark. There were people screaming, Metal Heads roaring, and KG bots beeping and Torn was smack dab in the middle of it. He was the Commander, he had to be.

“I need ten people on the Mar walk barricade!” he ordered, sighting through his rifle’s crosshairs and picking off three more Metals as they attempted to claw their way over the barricade. Grunts, grunts and scorpions were all that had been left over but fuck if they weren’t an effective attack force. Even without a proper leader they were giving Haven a run for its money, not to mention when they linked up with the KG bots. They'd already been a force to be reckoned with and now they were a hellish, impossible to defeat army. 

The Metal Heads had attacked first, swarming through the new break in their defences and overwhelming the few teams Torn’d had out there. Reinforcements had rushed over from the Port interior but even if they’d gotten there the same second the first scorpion scuttled in, they still would’ve been too late. Which was probably the best metaphor for this whole fucking thing but Torn couldn't be sure, he'd never been interested enough in literature to know. 

They’d lost half a squad in that first wave. Ten people, dead as a doornail from sheer overwhelming numbers. No strategy had been able to help them; no amount of manoeuvring had been able to save their lives. Then the bots had picked up the slack, they’d rushed through the Industrial sector, rallying their forces and taking advantage of the weakened defences.

Torn had been in the first charge because Jak had been dealing with the Metal Heads who’d slipped through the initial defence and the FLG needed a commander. Torn had snatched up his sniper rifle, the one he hadn’t used since his days in the Guard, and had fallen in with a team. Captain Hax had scrounged up a helmet for him and together they’d directed guards and held off the bots until other squads could meet them. Even then it hadn't been enough.  

They’d lost three men, even as prepared for bots as they were, they lost three men before another squad could get to them. One had been electrocuted right in front of Torn’s eyes; he’d seen the skin start to boil and burn and blacken then he’d looked away. Another Guard had their throat slashed open by a metal claw, the armour always had been weak at the joints; the man had bled out in front of them. The last Guard, well he’d gone the good old fashioned way, a plasma blast to the head that'd left nothing but a smoking stump of a neck. 

“And whoever we can spare on that fire,” he added reloading his gun for what felt like the hundredth time, he was running out of ammo faster than was comfortable.

And of course, in the middle of this clusterfuck a fire had broken out in one of the many Port warehouses when lightning struck it. It was raining muses and crocadogs and some-fucking-how a _warehouse_ was on **_fire_**. They were being soaked to the bone and they were dodging bits and pieces of burning debris. Torn had had to spare people to put it out, people who **_couldn’t_** be spared and the Metal Heads had taken advantage of it. Now the FLG had to work triple time to regain lost ground.

This was a shit show if Torn had ever seen one and he’d seen plenty.

“Commander Jak in bound,” Mira reported as she ran over to the barricade, skating to a stop with her squad who started shoring up defences and joining in the fight for their lost ground. Torn cursed, not colourfully, not even creatively; he was dead tired, five hours of fighting and defending, gaining and losing ground as the fight waged on showed.

His people were over extended, **_he_** was over extended. He had a relative one hundred and fifty FLG still standing from the three hundred he’d had in the first place. He'd started with fifteen squads of twenty and now there was about a single full squad left in fighting shape, the rest were pieced together from broken squads and teams. Torn had started out with fifteen Captains, fifteen people who could order and lead their forces; there were seven Captains left.

Seven Captains with a hundred and fifty guards between them to defend two barricades and the entirety of the Port. Torn had set two on the defence of the Mar Walk Barricade by the Metal Head City Section and two on the defence of the Industrial Barricade over at the mouth of the Industrial Section. There were about eighty-five guards spread between the four Captains on Barricade defence with a little over twenty a squad and sixty-five to the three Captains on Port Protection.

“Have him hold this barricade,” Torn ordered, ducking under a metal pipe from a collapsed house frame and racing off to the other barricade.

Torn had overseen the construction and maintenance of the two barricades, one at the mouth of Mar Walk which now led to Metal Central and the other at the head of the Industrial District- _former_ Industrial District. These barricades were nothing like the Baron’s barricades, they weren’t made of polished wood and metal scaffolding, they weren’t made to be used during assaults or riots. These barricades were desperate wartime things made out of scavenged shit; broken house timbers, burnt out zoomer frames, matchstick furniture and were the only chance the Port had.

The FLG was stretched too thin to face an all out attack, the trickle through waves were about as much as they could handle. The barricades created a bottleneck, forced the Metals and Bots to come through one at a time, to crawl over each other and then up the slip-shod tower of garbage to get into the Port proper.  If the barricades fell, then Metals and KGs would swarm them and not even miracle man Jak could save their asses.

Speaking of miracle man Jak. Torn had been playing this delicate game of keep-away for the entirety of the assault thus far, having his people inform him of Jak’s movements and counteracting them. It was like a fast-paced, live-action version of the game he’d played with Erol; given some information but not _too_ much, use the information you have to counteract the information you gave and let him catch just enough to keep it all in play.

All while avoiding Metals and trying to get as many guards through as he could. There was so much blood and so much water and he was exhausted already but Torn knew Jak was currently full of single minded determination. Jak was focused on holding the fort by any means necessary and it was enough that he had to consider Daxter

Jak did **_not_** do his best work when he had someone else to keep track of and protect. All of his calculations, his brutal fighting style and insane stunts had been created with only himself and the rat in mind. Whenever Jak had been forced to factor another person into the equation, he’d always been thrown off entirely. The second the kid caught wind Torn was actually out here though, he would unconsciously adjust his strategy, keep on Torn’s ass instead of what he was doing right now which was saving _all_ their asses.

The Demolition Duo were living up to their name today: getting in behind enemy lines and blowing them the fuck up, crushing attempts at rallying, and keeping morale at a high as they flitted from place to place. By some consensus all his men had started calling Jak ‘Commander’, as though an eighteen-year-old could ever be experienced enough to be a Commander. Torn couldn’t find fault in it though, that eighteen-year-old probably had more experience than half the FLG. Jak had fought against the Baron, he’d fought this City and he’d fought the Metal Heads, he'd fought and fought was still fighting.

“Status report Captain,” Torn demanded, falling into place at the second barricade, this one in slightly better condition than the last. Well, it wasn’t half collapsing on people and there were no metal heads swarming over it so yeah, better condition.

“There’s a break in bot activity, we’re not sure if it’s a rally for a continued attack or a sign of the assault retreating altogether,” Captain Raede said. And that could either be the best news he’d heard all week or the worst he’d heard since the Underground days. The FLG couldn’t handle much more of this, the rain showed no sign of stopping and everyone was exhausted. This was the hardest battle they’d ever fought and the thought of having to continue for several hours more would definitely break spirits. _But_ if there was even the slightest chance of the enemy falling back then they had to exploit it.

“Get Captain Hax on the horn, I want her to bring two teams around to the Industrial barricade and set charges. The next wave that hits, we’re blowing it,” Torn explained, picking off a bot with a neat hole through the main servo. He was better with sniper rifles than anything else; he had the patience to wait for the perfect shot and he had the training to make sure every bullet counted. Sure he preferred knives and pistols in hand to hand but he was a sniper at heart though there was rarely the chance for him to be one anymore.

Instead he was a Commander, he had to plan out how everyone would survive. He had to think up strategies on the fly and pray to the Precursors that he hadn’t just killed his people. The Barricades had been a desperate idea, between Torn remembering the Baron’s and one from a book. The Baron’s barricades had been clean and polished and shiny and they'd failed, the one in the book had been military grade and made to hold off hordes and because it was a book, it had worked.

The one _Torn_ had directed his people to make had been scavenged from destroyed zoomers, old furniture and houses, even concrete from the broken roadways. They rocked with every wave of enemies scrambling over them, they needed guards to hold them up and every time a guard got picked off, they trembled dangerously. Every time there was a scream of horror, a bone chilling gurgle as another person died, a splash of blood or the smell of burning flesh, the barricades shuddered on their unsteady foundations.

But somehow, some **_fucking_** how these scavenged, held-together-by-a-hope-blood-and-a-prayer things were doing the job they’d asked of them. Somehow they reminded Torn of Dead Town when it’d been kill or be killed, when the mud under your boots sucked you down and fought you just as hard as the Metal Heads. The Baron’s barricades had been ineffective, the Metal Heads were used to careful order, the secondary barricades though, the Metal Heads had no idea what to do about those.

 _Those_ barricades had been cobbled together too; they’d been a last ditch effort to protect the citizens they could and keep whatever ground was left to them while they waited for back-up. Torn had been among one of the few left waiting for back-up that had never come, holding a barricade made of wood and bodies.

“Roger, Commander Rhett. Mar Walk barricade left wing broken, repairs underway, Commander Jak supervising,” Raede said, stunning a scorpion with a shock before bringing a knife down on its head.

Well at least Torn didn’t have to scramble away like a bat-moth out of hell, he had a little time here but not much. He could take a second to breathe deep enough to feel the hairline fractures along his ribs and to wince at the stabbing pain in his gut. He could take a second to push his rain drenched, sweat soaked and blood matted hair out of his face and pinch the bridge of his nose. He was _tired_ and hurting and there was so much death going on around him but he had to keep fighting, he had to fight until he was dead or the enemy was.

Everywhere he turned, Metal Heads were bearing down on his people, Bots were ripping into them or picking them off with well-placed shots. Bodies were being dragged off by the living, the almost dead were trying their best to get to safety, at least relative safety. The guards on the interior were fighting hard to keep the civvies safe, they were running around more than Torn, they were working hard and he had no excuse.

Torn took a breath then he propped his sniper rifle on a rotten chair and started picking off scorpions and spider mechs. The little fuckers had been subverting their defences from the very beginning of the assault, tunnelling in under their feet and popping up in should-be-secure areas. They’d taken advantage of the breaks in the roads, the places where previous battles had broken up or outright destroyed the concrete. One good thing the rain had done was make the earth too muddy and unpredictable for the little fuckers to keep tunnelling around under what concrete was left. Now they were forced to move above ground where they were much easier to clear out.

Torn must’ve shot out ten of the shits before word came again, there was a blast bot headed their way and Jak was en route to intercept, aka straight for where Torn was bunkered. He felt the sick fluttering start up in his chest again, the beginnings of panic, before he forced it all down. He had a job to do.

“Shit! Captain Hax, where are we on those charges?” he barked, breaking down his sniper rifle and snatching extra clips as he started off at a dead run for the Port walkway. If he was lucky, he’d be able to duck onto the walkway without Jak ever seeing him. Even though he had to make the entire roundabout run to get to the other barricade but that was a small price to pay. Jak was the only one that could take out Blast Bots without risking imminent death and decapitation, and he did it fucking efficiently too. The kid can take out a Blast Bot and he does it with the least amount of ammo and casualties, Precursors.  

“Almost done here Commander, just another minute,” Hax reported over her comm. Torn jumped a steaming pile of warped zoomer like a hurdle and kept going, straight for a group of wounded Cloakers. _Cloakers_? They were too close to the barricade, close enough that Guards **_should_** have picked them off, for Torn to be running into them though…

The creatures squealed when they realised he was barrelling at them full speed. They smacked their blasters and shoved at one another, not sure how to deal with him, not sure how to react to his brand of unhinged. Torn grinned at them, peeled his lips back from his teeth in a snarl, and tackled the nearest one to the ground. The only reason any Metals would be this far into the Port, right behind a barricade much less, was because they’d _killed_ the Guards who’d been posted at the roundabout.

The other two Metals reeled back, squawking in confusion and fear as he lifted their companion and slammed it back on the ground over and _over_ again. The armour was sharp where Torn had hooked his fingers in, slicing the flesh to the bone and making his grip slick as blood trickled down over his palms but he _didn’t_. _Let. It. **Go**._

Torn grinned manically down into its half cloaked face with its bloodied fangs and wild animal eyes wide with alien intelligence.  Torn smiled down at the thing he’d hated since the day he was born and kept slamming it against the ground until its skull cracked open like an egg. Until purple blood splashed and splattered his face like macabre war paint, running in streaks down his cheeks as the rain continued to pour down.

He didn’t let it go to wipe the burning blood from his face, he didn’t let go to staunch his bleeding hands.

“Not _my_ fucking city, not **_again_** ,” he barked, staring down into its eyes and keeping its gaze.

The sounds of the battle were going on all around him; the sounds of blaster shots going off, of people screaming and not stopping, the sound of Guards shouting orders at each other. Torn heard this battle and heard another one alongside it; an ill-fated one that had lost so many people and so much land. Last time he’d been a grunt, a captain of the guard and apparently expendable as everyone else in this Precursors damned City. Last time he’d been the last of a vanguard to crawl his way back into a city that didn’t want him and had already filled the space he’d occupied not ten hours earlier.

Last time had been a **_massacre_**.

“Not again!” he swore, swinging the butt of his sniper rifle around and catching another Cloaker across the face. The force of breaking the thing’s jaw travelled up his arm like an electric shock and when the adrenaline wore off it was going to hurt like all different shades of hell but right now he couldn’t give a fuck if he tried. Right now he didn't give a fuck about anything but this City, his home. 

The last Cloaker tried to beat a healthy retreat but not a chance in fuck was Torn letting it get away. He caught it just above the start of its vertebrae with a well thrown knife, the blade sliding into the skin like a hot knife through butter with a sickening ‘ _Sshhluck’._

Torn was up and running before the body hit the ground, stopping only long enough to retrieve his knife. Behind him the Industrial barricade exploded, the sound so loud he went deaf for a few seconds. Torn couldn’t hear anything more than a tinny ringing as he tried to adjust to the balance shift; he fell into a stumbling run before the chaos of a battlefield seeped back into his perception. He needed to make it back to the Ottsel, he needed to take stock of the situation and work out more strategies.

He found the bodies of the four-man team who’d been guarding the entrance to the Port walkway. He had to keep moving, he had to keep fucking **_moving_** but Precursors. Precursors he couldn’t see straight as he lurched forward, stumbled forward. The guards had been...eaten, ‘ _Half eaten’_ his mind corrected helpfully.

Their armour had been peeled away, chunks had been missing from their arms and legs, their stomachs had been torn open. The last time Torn had seen half eaten carcasses had been Dead Town, when he was one of thirty-four guards left holding an abandoned town. He’d seen Metal Heads feasting on the dead. He’d seen Metal Heads gorging themselves on the half dead and he never wanted to see that again. And if he never wanted to see Dead Town again, Torn needed to keep moving.

There was a sharp pain in his side as he left the Port walkway. He’d cleared the whole thing in less than ten minutes and that included stopping for the Cloakers. Between whatever other injuries and fighting for _hours_ and running faster than he had in a long time, Torn was ready to keel over and pass out. He couldn’t though, instead he focussed on the bits of burning things and ash mixing with the rain and falling on him.

Burning embers had reached as far as the Mar Walk barricade, they fell on his clothes and started little fires everywhere but the fucking monsoon was taking care of them. The rain had put out the warehouse fire too because apparently the Precursors wanted them to drown while they burned, how thoughtful. If it wasn’t burning it was drowning and wasn’t that just a nice little metaphor for their shit show lives?

Individual battles were being fought all around him; smaller four-man teams surrounding and squeezing Grunts and Cloakers, overloading bots with electricity from their stunners. Sometimes Metals or Bots would get a jump on lone men or make a play for the injured who were still trying to fight, who weren’t giving up until the sky itself crashed down on them. The injured were everywhere, huddled against a warehouse wall with a gun held in shaking hands, sprawled out on the hard ground mere feet away from the enemy.

They couldn’t run with a squad, they couldn’t shore up defences and were more of a liability to a proper team than anything else but as a lone man. As lone guard they had a better chance, they didn’t have to burden anyone else and they could still defend themselves somewhat. At the very least, they wouldn’t have anyone trying to save them if an enemy combatant came by and took advantage of their vulnerable position. They could die in relative peace knowing they hadn’t made anyone else risk their lives to save them.

Torn knew all about the Hero plays and he stopped to help where he could, taking pot shots with his pistol or tackling creatures to the ground. Heroes lived fast and died young but not if he could fucking help it. Too many people had died already for him to stand by and do nothing when he saw one of his guards being attacked.

If he charged down a metal, he tried to stab it in the ear for an easy kill but sometimes he had no choice but to slit their throats. Sometimes it was hard to get a good enough grip on his knife to take the easy kill, sometimes the slick blood and wet rain made it hard to keep his grip on the Metal Head he was trying to kill.

If he got a bot, he’d scramble for his pistol and try to get one clean shot through their central processors before their guns locked on him. Sometimes his finger couldn’t slip onto the trigger, couldn’t curl the way he needed it to and he’d have to scramble out of the way of a robotic claw or a blaster shot. Then he’d have to ignore the new burning pain of being grazed by a blaster shot or sharp metal and fight on because he wasn’t fast enough.

Even stopping to help though; to drag the injured somewhere safer or fight with a team or save one lone soldier, Torn still made it to the Ottsel before Jak made a pass back. He made it back to the Ottsel just as the Industrial Barricade blew and shook the entire building like a bomb had been dropped. Torn dropped to the floor and rolled under a table, hands up by his head in case anything fell on him, fuck he had no idea the charges would be that strong. By the time everything had settled back, the sound of fighting had resumed and he needed to get back to fucking work. 

His hands were trembling as he crawled out from under the table and reached for the comm station, he needed to check the incoming comms, the ones that went directly to the HQ and couldn’t be rerouted to his personal transmitter. He left bloody hand prints on the floor and bloody smears on the screen and when he grabbed at the table edge to stop from falling over, he left smudges almost in the shape of fingers.

He should wrap his hands tight with some eco soaked bandages but Torn didn’t have the time for that now, he needed to restock on ammo and get another rifle since the last one was missing a barrel. He had to check their resources and run calculations to find out just how much longer they could withstand the attack. Their resources were dangerously low, health packs were scarce and even surgical supplies were hard to come by now that the Metal section had been reopened.

Torn was flying on autopilot as he assembled a new rifle and pulled up the log he’d meticulously kept updated as the fight wore on. His hands hurt, his fingers could barely curl much less keep steady on a trigger but he would have to, there was no choice.  

The flood of voices made him pause though, kept him still long enough for his over rushed brain to process the jumble, scramble of words coming through. Kept him still long enough for the fluttering, flittering bit of hope in his chest to beat against his ribs, trying to break out so it could twist and dance in the air.

“Blast bot within sight of Industrial Barricade, Commander Jak on site.”

“Blast bot sighted in Metal Head City Section, Captains Raede and Hax engaging.”

“Blast Bot intercepted by rogue combatant.”

“Blast Bot detained by rogue combatant. Captains Raede and Hax with full report.”

“Metal head offensive repelled, Mar Walk barricade decimated.”

“KG offensive still making incursions; Commander Jak intercepting.”

“Industrial Barricade decimated. Blast Bot decimated. Commander Jak unaccounted for.”

“Commander Jak spotted.”

“Secondary Blast Bot sighted. Commander Jak and Daxter engaging.”

“Secondary Blast Bot enroute to Southern HQ. Commander Jak and Daxter engaged.”

“Secondary Blast Bot destroyed.”

“One hundred and thirty-six guards accounted for, medical teams in bound.”

“Captains Kate and Mir accounted for. Medical rescue underway.”

“Captains Raede, Mira and Alv accounted for. City secured.”

“Captains Taz and Hax reporting. All civilian bunkers intact and accounted for.”

“…thank you Commanders.”

Torn wasn’t ashamed to say he fell to his knees when the meaning of the reports got through his muddled brain. He wasn’t ashamed to say he cried a little when he realised that they’d done it, they’d actually done it. He **_wasn’t_** going to be the Commanding Officer while the City endured another Dead Town.

Torn was riding high as he clawed his way back into a standing position and grabbed at his comm. There was only one direct link open, only one he’d kept open no matter what he had to do to manage it.

“You did it Jak, you stopped the assault!” Torn wheezed, voice hoarse from strain and giddy hysteria. He couldn’t see past his own tears and his entire body was just one huge, pulsing bruise but they’d done it.

“You did it.”


	13. Leave me hopeless and hoping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Calms before and after storms are never calm

There was a calm that settled over every battlefield after the battle was over and done. A quiet calm after the storm when people were dead tired but pushing through it all because even with a battle won, the war waged on and war was hell. War was hell and Torn was the Commanding officer left to deal with it all.

The quiet was when the carrion birds descended on the dead en masse and started fighting their own wars over the choicest bits. Torn already had people dragging the dead to more secure areas, the bodies would go into storage until there was time for a proper burial. There was never enough time for the mass funerals they had much less single, personal funerals but it was the best they could do. All the bodies would be piled up and whatever wood could be spared was built up around the mound of bodies.

Sometimes there was enough spare red eco to waste on a spark, sometimes they used gun powder and precision aim to set the whole thing blazing. Other times, times like these, they had to make do with what they had on hand and what they had on hand were dozens of half burnt out, still sparking KG bots. When Torn had a few minutes to get his shit together, he’d send out the call for the final rites, they’d have it on the port walk way this time.

“We can store the last shipment in the Port Walk warehouses,” he said, fighting to remain upright while he sorted out the storage of supplies. Supplies they needed, food, medical supplies, weapons, but god was it hell finding somewhere to keep the shit with half their regular warehouses out of commission. Some had been destroyed during the assault, others were housing injured Guards and the rest were acting as temporary shelters for civilians. Torn had a paper map spread out on the comm station and more than half of it was covered in scratchy red letters.

Here were platoons five, six and eight. Here were twenty civilians bunkered down. Here there wasn’t enough space for the eco packs coming through and they needed to keep this warehouse empty for the fucking death bot Jinx had decided to take prisoner.

“Yes sir, and the expenses will be charged to the war fund?” Captain Hax clarified, shifting carefully while standing at perfect ease. Torn didn’t even remember what was wrong with her, maybe bruised or broken ribs based on the stance, she could have a shattered ankle with the way she was favouring her leg too but he didn’t know. He couldn’t remember half of what he should and he knew he needed to sleep but there was just so much to do and not enough people left to do it.

“I’ll get in contact with the Governor about it soon, until then we’ll use the war fund,” Torn answered, making another red mark on the map and sighing. When they’d gotten cut off in the Port supplies weren’t the only thing they’d start to run short on, money was a problem too. Ashelin had complete control over the City’s finances from New Haven but wiring any of it through was a problem. They needed to link up to HQ before the funds they had dried up and before another wave hit and before Veger managed to convince the Council of anymore yakow shit.

Torn waited until he heard the bar door close behind the captain before sighing. There was always so much to do, even when he wasn’t on the front lines with his men, there was more to do. Jak was upstairs sleeping again, after a truly incredible piece of miracle working and some stunts so crazy Torn didn’t even want to think about them. The kid had made Torn’s men blow a barricade with him in _mid **-** air **,**_ he used the god damn explosion as a **_distraction_** for a fucking blast bot so he could take it out with a **single** well placed shot. Torn didn’t even want to know half the shit that went through the kid’s head.

“Well Commander, fancy meeting you here,” Jinx, of course it was Jinx, said as he sauntered into the Ottsel. Torn felt his lips press together tight as he squinted down at the map again, there was a single warehouse that was completely empty and it was because of the man standing in front of him. Jinx had somehow captured a blast bot, Torn didn’t want to know because it would be just one more thing to worry about on top of a pre-existing dozen but they still have a rogue death bot waiting to be put to use.

“The bot’s all prepped and ready to go, outfitted the thing with more explosives than a hex-dex charge. Trust me, Rhett, you’ll love this one,” Jinx promised because of course he would add more charges to one of the most violently mobile explosives they had. He wanted to argued, fuck if Torn didn’t want to argue but he couldn’t, there was nothing else to do with a Death Bot. Sure they hacked the fucking thing some fucking how but all it’d take was a second for the KG factory to break through their hack and re-take the bot. Every second they waited was another second closer to the inevitable, plus the fucking things had countdown detonations that couldn’t be turned off no matter how hard they tried.

And they had tried, they’d tried ever since they broke into Praxis ‘weapons cache’ and found advanced versions of the security tanks, and found prototype armoured hellcat single seaters, and found the death bots. Ashelin hadn’t known about her father’s secret cache but Jak had, he’d heard about it for a long, long time. Praxis had bragged about it a lot apparently, said that all his greatest achievements went in there and when Jak was done, he’d go in there too.

Torn hadn’t let Jak come with them when they went to break open the weapon’s cache, he’d sent the kid and Daxter to clear out the Temple with a squad of men. He made sure to order all of his people to keep Jak away for the rest of the day, maybe half the night if they could too because he didn’t want the kid around at all. Between then and now, they still hadn’t figured out how to shut off the countdown and he’d like to blame it on the time but he knew there were no excuses.

If he ran a tighter operation then his people would’ve figure it out before now and they wouldn’t be running on another clock.

“This better be good,” Torn grunted, pinching the bridge of his nose as he inspected the map again. They had gained ground, this bot would help them get through the last barrier and back to HQ but that was barely half the fight, even if they managed to get back, they’d have to keep the Port protected and the path between open too. The map had little markers for how many men he had left and how many men he approximated Ashelin to have and the numbers didn’t look good.

“If you can get Jakkie boy to steer, this baby’ll get us through,” Jinx swore and Torn’s nerves were too shot for this. He didn’t want to know why Jinx thought he should give Jak control of the bot but he didn’t have a choice here. He needed to know the plan because if the bot was going into enemy territory, he’d have to set guards up with it and he’d been planning on sending Jak. Jak couldn’t go if he was piloting, Torn didn’t think at least, Jak was the miracle worker after all so he might be able to.

“It’s like this Rhett, ain’t nobody been through there in a month cept for Jakkie boy right? He’ll know what’s new and what’s not, he’ll know the best road for our friend here to take without having to double back, get me?” Jinx added when Torn tilted his head back and sighed. Right, this was just like the sewers, he couldn’t risk sending people in blind, no one but Jak and god this was just like the Underground days wasn’t it?

No matter how much Torn didn’t want to admit it, this were just like then. He was backed up against a wall, barely able to set foot outside his four walls and sending men to their deaths because he was too valuable. Then came miracle man Jak who took mission after mission and made them his bitches. Then came miracle man Jak who held back a fucking Death Bot with his bare hands and forced it to self-detonate before it could reach the Ottsel and somehow managed to repel the biggest attack wave Torn had ever seen.

“He’s at the gun range right now, we’ll give it three hours before we make the run,” Torn sighed, dragging a hand down his face and frowning at the way it shook. He had cut his fingers to the bone grabbing the metal’s armour and he’s gotten shocked more than once rigging the Ottsel’s power supply and he still hadn’t gotten any green eco on it. There _wasn’t_ any green eco to put on it so he just had to deal for now, deal with good old fashioned bandages and sutures and whatever alcohol he could get his hands on. His shaking, unsteady hands.

“Almost home free baby, then we can turn the whole thing around,” Jinx…reassured him, Torn didn’t even give a fuck what the word was supposed to be anymore. He was tired, so tired, but there was so much more left to do and he had a death bot that was going to detonate in forty-eight hours anyway so why not give it to his best man? Why not just fucking give all his trust back to Jak anyway?

Why not forget everything that had happened between Praxis and now and the council and Jak and just…pretend it would be okay? Pretend he was acting out the same song and dance again because why not? What could it hurt? He’d end up dead? Well that wasn’t such a big consequence right?

“Let’s go check on the bot, I want to see what you did to it,” Torn said, curling his shaking hands into trembling fists and closing up the maps of the Port. There were still smudges of blood on everything, his blood; browning black and crusted, metal head blood; purpling red and still tacky. He’d clean it soon, get this place back to some kind of good, then he’d let Jak take over and take them on the home stretch.


End file.
